this post was submitted on 29 May 2025
473 points (97.8% liked)
Technology
70918 readers
3591 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I doubt this is news to most folks on the Fediverse, but don’t trust Twitter, Facebook, or any company whose business model is advertising to secure your private conversations.
Even if they aren’t up to no good today, it is only a matter of time until they come for your messages.
As it happens, you shouldn’t trust Lemmy DMs either, as they’re not encrypted and can be read by instance administrators. So don’t use them to say anything that you wouldn’t be okay making public.
this should be the default stance when using any built in encryption. always separate the mode of encryption from the mode of transmission.
Someone told me they are public some months ago? Like if someone wanted to look up your lemmy DMs they could.
There was an exploit in version 0.17.0 through 0.19.0 (fixed in 0.19.1) that, from what I understand, allowed people to view DMs of anyone by reporting them, but as you can't know the ID of a given DM you're not part of, they couldn't really target a specific user, but rather would just send reports to a range of potential IDs and see what comes back.
I’ve been hearing a lot of straight up adverts about WhatsApp recently, which I found interesting.
I saw a WhatsApp ad on Prime. And it was focused on the encryption aspect. "WhatsApp can't even read your messages" or whatever. Was weird.
I’m hearing a lot of that on the radio.
You're saying this on a platform that has no business model for making money and basically has no security or privacy because you're trusting whichever random people run the instances.
And I treat this platform accordingly. There is no expectation of privacy here. You are a private as you choose to be.