I am a firm believer that there are many privacy techniques you should focus on before encrypted messaging because they will offer you mu...
I am a firm believer that there are many privacy techniques you should focus on before encrypted messaging because they will offer you much more “bang for your buck,” things like good passwords, two-factor authentication, and even encrypted email. That said, I still believe that encrypted messaging is a critical part of a well-rounded privacy and security strategy. While the vast majority of our day-to-day conversations may be benign, it can still offer a lot of insight into who we are as people – our routines, likes, and personal thoughts. This information – mundane or not – is worth protecting.
SimpleX is currently my favourite. Yeah, there are some small concerns, but where aren't they? I hope SimpleX can grow more popular and I'm also waiting for a full-featured desktop client, so it'll be easier to convince people to switch.
Another basic thing -- If your messenger is throwing your messages in a notification; it's being logged. Google was found to be logging almost all notification content. Make sure your message app isn't putting the content of messages into notifications.
You can also just use a degoogled os which won't be logging your notification content. But in any case you shouldn't have notifications as notifications are exclusive with at-rest encryption (or I guess you could have at-rest encryption but just have the db constantly decrypted whenever your phone is on? Seems to defeat the point then)
Session should probably be avoided as well, primarily because they've disabled things like perfect forward secrecy and a few other security measures that probably should not have been disabled.
Why do people like Matrix? It's really slow. Even most of the non-Electron clients consume a ton of resources (even more than Electron apps usually do).
Especially Gomuks, by far the worst offender. It consumes nearly a gigabyte of memory and it's a TUI.
Well, it's not privacy-focused.. but I do like Revolt for this purpose. It's performant, looks very similar to Discord, and I think they're adding E2EE eventually.
What I like about Matrix so much is that it can be run fully on your own infrastructure, even the TURN server for VOIP, and you can build the clients from source yourself too.
But I agree that it's quite difficult to use. And until now only my dad and my spouse use it with me because they love me and trust me. But they both always have problems with their clients. It randomly logs out and then they have to login with the password and with the encryption key again. For a long time calling didn't work because I misconfigured the server. Then videos were for the longest time uploaded in full size and anything longer than a few seconds would be rejected. The whole spaces thing is implemented very weirdly so it confuses them. And then the threads are even worse so we can't use them because nobody gets how to do it.
Right? It is a generic protocol for all sorts off communications, some of which don’t require encryption. Yet every modern chat client for human-to-human communication has OMEMO, OTR, & PGP encryption options.
XMPP clients have like 10 different implementations because of that and are not always consistent with each other or even function universally across platforms.