When my mother got breast cancer, my Facebook page suddenly filled up with ads for laetrile and quack clinics across the border in Mexico. Even though I know better, I might have grasped at straws had it come to that. Thankfully it didn't, but I love my mother and Facebook was happy to sell that vulnerability to advertisers.
And the thing is, I had never posted about it. My two sisters had used the chat feature to discuss it, and FB made the connection.
That was the moment that privacy and encryption became important to me. Most encryption services have probably been infiltrated by the feds to some degree, and I can live with that. It's the corporations I want to hide from.
Most encryption services have probably been infiltrated by the feds to some degree, and I can live with that. It’s the corporations I want to hide from.
France has recently started going after people who organize demonstrations.
They have had zero problems getting big social media and even Discord to give up information about people.
But some chat apps were safe from the governments, so why do you think the Telegram CEO was arrested?
Recently? Maybe i'm wrong, but i remember a 2 years old news telling that france was pursuing allowing the police to spy on rioter's phones.... I remember it was not long after the "end" of the yellow jacket's riots, so maybe it's even older.
Telegram is not safe from governments. Maybe safe from Western ones.
It does not have E2EE for most things. Which means TG users are not safe from TG owners, and TG owners are not safe from those who are the force behind them.
Maybe it's Israel, maybe it's Russia, Durov's female friend was spotted in Baku in a "cyber-security" center operated by Israelis, so maybe Azerbaijan. Maybe I don't know.
You don't have to know which exactly force that is. All you have to know is how TG works.
people who organize demonstrations
... can use Signal. Its usability has improved a lot since I last tried using it. I've just moved half of our family chats there, another half is waiting till a bit later, because they are on another continent. It's as convenient as WhatsApp.
I get the feeling this thing, I mean, the ad targeting is far stronger in the USA (maybe also in europe) than in the rest of the world. My "ad targeting" is idiotic. I once was in brazil (argentinian here!). And got ads in portuguese for a year or so. I was a month planning on buying a computer, with all that that involves (google searchs, looking for prices on internet) and i never got an ad until i actually bought everything, then it was 2 months of ads recommending me to buy the exact same components i already bought.
As today, half of my ads are in german. Jokes on them, i use them to learn.
I dont mean to be snide, but the abbreviation for advertisement is 'ad', not add.
Also, using uBlock Origin on Firefox (or its various forks) gets you rid of ads pretty much universally. It's also a security feature in the post-2000's internet; lots of malware use ads as an attack vector.
You should not need to suffer through ads - no one should.