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.

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 :)

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

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

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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.

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Yes, please add Session. Wire is missing, too.

A version of this with usability features would be nice. Some of these I gave earnest tries, with multiple friends who were willing to indulge my interest, and the tools failed for various reasons: too cumbersome, too confusing, too unreliable, too basic. It's a subjective metric, but these are social tools, and to be useful, they have to be usable -- and many simply aren't.

I don't know if it's humorous, but one unexpected thing I discovered was that Wire's and Session's embedded animated GIF finder+inserter is so hugely desireable with my friends, it became an almost minimum requirement. Funny GIFs are immensely popular.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Session, Wire, and Element are done and will be added later today

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago

I just saw Session - thanks!

But now I'm confused. Maybe you could add notes about what some of the rows mean. For example:

Upon what is based the "recommended for private comnunication?" Recommended by whom? Under what criteria?
Why is Session's voice/video "n/a" when it supports encrypted voice and video calls?
Why is running a private server, rated as higher security than distributed, tor-like onion networks? (can self host), and why is Session listed as "no" when anyone can self host routing nodes in the network? This preference for centralized servers over distributed onion networks is particularly baffling for a privacy-focused table.

This is a huge labor. Thanks again for attempting it.