Privacy

31837 readers

90 users here now

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.

In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.

Some Rules

Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
Don't promote proprietary software
Try to keep things on topic
If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
Be nice :)

Related communities

Chat rooms

[Matrix/Element]Dead
Discord

much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

426

I made a spreadsheet that ranks messengers for privacy (privacyspreadsheet.com)

submitted 9 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

124 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I've been working really hard to research and rank messaging apps by their privacy. The more green boxes the better.

I plan to turn PrivacySpreadsheet.com into a place for privacy data on everything from cars to video games. It's all open source too on GitHub.

Not trying to advertise, I just put a lot of time into researching all this, and I want to share it since I think others could benefit.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago (1 children)

The messaging app front I consider to be a long-term stalemate, mainly due to crippling network effects. Another factor is that strange psychology at play when making app decisions, where a person will have page after page of junk apps on their phones, yet utterly balks at the notion of installing a second messenger.

Even if a large actor (say, the EU?) managed to bruteforce some interoperability into being, I wonder whether that would be to the detriment of small apps in terms of undermining (or even eliminating) their privacy protections. I can use the likes of Session or Simplex all day long, but if the other side of the conversation is on a corporate product like Whatsapp... It runs into the same problem as email.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

where a person will have page after page of junk apps on their phones, yet utterly balks at the notion of installing a second messenger.

Ffs this drives me crazy.

I have a friend who bitches about SMS being shit, every.single.day.

But will they use another app? No. "I don't want to have to use different messaging apps". Oh, so what you're saying is you're OK with how shitty SMS is. So stop complaining.

Really, it's not like you don't already have 3 email accounts, and have had a few phone numbers. And your friends numbers have changed over the years too.

This is something you use all day, every day. Not hard to find a conversation - hell, both iOS and Android show you this on a per contact basis.

So I'm not sure what's really going on when people say this. There's some other weird mental thing happening.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

Now you have something visual that you can show them and say "this is how bad SMS is compared to Signal"