Privacy

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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

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Does MATRIX recipients know my IP? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 4 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

45 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I wanna know if MATRIX recipients know my IP, and more globally what the recipients know about me (how the matrix protocol works). THX

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Obviously you need someone joining the room for the room metadata to be shared between homeservers. But that is really only a minor barrier and once that has happened the worst case scenario takes place immediately. On other messengers (federated or not) a newly joining member has very limited access to past room metadata. Not so with Matrix, where a joining homeserver get full retroactive access to all the room metadata since the room's creation. If you can't see the problem with that, you really need to stop privacy LARPing 🙄

[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

Obviously you need someone joining the room for the room metadata to be shared between homeservers.

Well then, your assertion that Matrix gives it freely is false.

Not so with Matrix, where a joining homeserver get full retroactive access to all the room metadata since the room’s creation.

This is false, too. Historical event visibility is controlled by a room setting. (And if you don't trust admins of a sensitive room to configure for privacy, then you're going to have bigger problems, no matter what platform it's on.)

Edit: I suppose you might argue that you can bypass this by running your own homeserver and attempting to join the room from it, thereby granting visibility not through joining (as you wrote), but instead through federation with the server you control. The thing is, you can't do it without permission. Room admins can simply deny your join request when they see what server you're on. This might make sense in a particularly sensitive room, for example, just as it would to restrict history visibility.

you really need to stop privacy LARPing

LARPing? I'm not the one stirring up drama with falsehoods and patronizing snark, am I? Farewell.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago

Well then, your assertion that Matrix gives it freely is false.

My point is that it should never give out that data, or even store it permanently in the first place. This is just a fundamentally bad design from a privacy perspective, and other messengers don't do that.

This is false, too. Historical event visibility is controlled by a room setting. (And if you don’t trust admins of a sensitive room to configure for privacy, then you’re going to have bigger problems, no matter what platform it’s on.)

This is not false, what you mean only hides it for normal users, but it still ends up in the database of all participating homeservers and all the admins of those have full access to it. I happen to run a Matrix homeserver myself...