Out of curiosity, data aggregation such as implemented by facebook in case of Wapp has been happening all over the world of mobile applications as well as WWW for more than a decade. So what prompted you to do it now?
Just curious. I also recently started using Signal because it"s the most well known privacy oriented application and an average joe or jane seem to be moving there (and telegram to a lesser extent).
Btw, I am not a huge fan of company run things such as protonmail, or signal since you basixally need to trust them to fulfil their end of the bargain, but Moxie, the creator of Signal, is such a unique individual that I am kind of okay with trusting him. In the worst case US govt has access to my stuff (like it did until now).
In an ideal world i"d use something peer to peer such as jami.
Currently trying out jitsi over the FSF run bridge (they do it for the affiliates) for videoconferencing and it works most of the time.
Used to be excited over Matrix and Element/Riot, but the client seems a bit sluggish to me and those bridges to other apps such as slack not that easy to use. But, Purism is building their comm stack around it so who knows.
Afaik, telegram is opensource (you can find it on fdroid). Their servers obviously are another matter, but isn’t that the case with signal, too? Besides, if you compile signal from source, xan you still access their network?
EDIT: apparently I"m blind ; but the question of compiling it and running yourself still remains.
This is the moment topic… It has been a pleasure find lots of info concentrated in only one place.
Obviuosly me, myself and I are all struggling to find an alternative and it isn’t easy to get a common agreement.
Anyway I would like to place a question that involves privacy regulamentation for all messaging apps.
One of my office mate rise the doubt about the appliance in EU for the new “Zuckemberg’s idea”, saying that GDPR is an umbrella good enough to skip the new WA privacy statement. In her opinion EU users shouldn’t be involved.
Yes, Telegram is open source and there is a FOSS version available via F-Droid. I’m not sure what all of the changes are between the normal and the -FOSS version, but I do know that the latter comes without support for push notifications.
Since the API is open sourced as well, you can also write your own clients. Hence, Telegram-Purple exists, which makes Telegram available to Pidgin etc. via libpurple.
Regarding your other question: that’s what the point “Are reproducible builds used to verify apps against source code?” in the table here:
As it says there, for Signal this is done for Android, but not (yet?) for iOS. Process is documented here:
In short, it was WhatsApp’s recent announcement that users would have to agree to new T&Cs or stop using the app.
I closed my Facebook account - which I didn’t really use, having originally created it for testing software I was working on at the time. When I started using WhatsApp a couple of years back, they were already owned by Facebook, but I believed at that time - possibly wrongly, I’m still not sure - that WhatsApp did not share data with Facebook. In any case, I chose not to upload contacts data from my phone.
My objections are to what FaceBook does with data: aggregating and analysing, then using it in the services they sell, allowing their customers to micro-target advertising and other messages. My eyes were opened further by the information which emerged about how data from FaceBook was used - sometimes illegally - to influence the results of the 2016 UK Brexit referendum (and subsequent UK general elections) and the 2016 US presidential election. Since then I have actively tried to persuade others to stop using FaceBook.
WhatsApp’s recent change to their T&Cs spurred me to look further into this, particularly the claim that the change would not apply to users in the European region (EU, EU & EEA countries). What I read leads me to believe that, if the ‘doesn’t apply in Europe’ claim is true, that is because WhatsApp are already passing data to FaceBook for use in their services. I am still not certain of that - the T&Cs (new and old) are very far from being clear and transparent - but the change was the push I needed to stop using WhatsApp altogether, and to persuade as many of the people and groups I know who use it to move to alternative services.
Sorry I don’t know I only use it on Desktop and Web, and only as a client for irc. It’s ages since I started using it and I have no idea about how to go about creating an account
I tried to address this in a response in a different thread
I believe that GDPR requires users to actively give their consent to use of data, and that it does not prohibit companies from collecting and using data so long as users give that consent. That’s why I won’t accept WhatsApp’s new T&Cs, because doing so would give them the consent they need to share data with FaceBook. As Facebook are saying (I think) that the new T&Cs do not involve a change to how they share data, it may well be that I had given consent previously without realising - my mistake
Thanks for reply. Haha, the way you write, it sounds like you had a choice. I simply had to install whatsap, because I would not be able to otherwise communicate with most of my contacts. The same went for Skype before (and even now). I don’t tend to preach about Signal, or XMPP based clients, because I get blank stares or get ignored as a weirdo.
But, it looks like all what was needed is for a couple of well-known virtue signalers and some newspapers such as Indy and Guardian to grumble a bit about “Big Tech” and people then migrate en masse. This is more effective than decades of activism by such organisations as FSF or EFF. Though the present odium towards surveilance capitalism may well be in large part due their efforts. I don’t know, but it’s really cool that I can now drag most people easily to a privacy-centric solution.
“I and a couple of other group members already have Telegram installed and would rather not install yet another messaging app” - I never understood this attitude. What difference does it make if there are two or three more apps (without trackers) on the phone? On old phones it was sometimes a battery issue but nowdays it really makes not much difference.
As long as someone else is willing to use some good messenger like signal, matrix/element, tox, wire, xmpp/conversation, delta.chat, etc., it’s fine by me to install such an app. As for receiving messages it does not really matter which messenger is in use.
Actually this is the real alternative to whatsapp, a mix of good messengers.
One practical thing. I very much like Signal, and have been using it (and preaching about it to contacts) for 2 years. But it has a nasty bug: voice-calls often (like 30% of the time) do not ring on the receiving phone. Only after the call the receiving phone gets a message “missed call”. (Github issues #7733, #8302, #8072, #9813, and #10680)
A workaround that often works (but not always) is to simply call again; the second time often the call does get through.
If anyone has a better solution to this I would be much obliged.
One of the good things about /e/ is that it prolongs the life of “old phones”. The problem with a couple of my devices - Moto E (condor) and Moto E LTE (surnia) - is not the battery, but the space available to install apps: it is very easy to get to the point where there is not enough space to install a new app, or even update existing apps. So I don’t want to install another app if I already have an app that does what I want.
Interesting chat folks.
For me Signal is great in terms of security and not sharing metadata, it offers a drop in experience to WhatsApp and is a good one to tempt those friend circles which are resistant to moving.
It terms of tech and the ideal future tech landscape of it comes down to two methods. Federated or Peer-to-Peer
At the moment there is only one player in town for federated and that’s Element.io
and for Peer-to-peer Tox has a lot of potential with offering video and file-sharing plus being cross platform (Can’t do video chat with WhatsApp from your laptop) and Briar is another interesting project that has hard security and can send messages through Tor and Wi-fi and Bluetooth so you can send messages even if the mobile network is down. Briar is aimed more at journalist and activists and recently became popular in Kashmir when the government cut off the mobile but Briar can operate without.
I see. I know that space issue too. If it’s about Telegram, IT folks keep warning about it: "Don’t Turn to Telegram - Because the chat app doesn’t encrypt conversations by default—or at all for group chats—security professionals often warn against it" https://www.wired.com/story/telegram-encryption-whatsapp-settings/
A while ago I also posted the link about the story of how easy it was for programers to download users’ messages. Fortunately Matrix, Tox, Signal, delta.chat, olvid, threema, Wire, etc. are getting better and better.
Jami is also nice, Similar to Tox in that it’s peer-to-peer and GPL3 I like the interface of Jami as well feels more human, but I tested it before Christmas and found video calls to be a bit choppy, It’s probably improved since then though.
Quicksy looks interesting but it’s another Jabber/XMPP client, while I was enthusiastic about these a few years ago and tried to get my friends to move to Jabber/XMPP clients as they could use their existing email clients making it an easy sell with the added bonus of being able to connect with their existing addressbook but… Gmail and GMX dropped Jabber/XMPP support which makes up over half of my friends and family, which then made it a bit of a hard sell to an new client that also doesn’t offer video calls. I find it had to see a future for Jabber/XMPP without video calls, I like the tech, it’s properly federated like email and many people already have it without realising it through their existing email, sadly more and more provides seem to be dropping support for the protocol.
; but the question of compiling it and running yourself still remains.
- but the change was the push I needed to stop using WhatsApp altogether, and to persuade as many of the people and groups I know who use it to move to alternative services.
I only use it on Desktop and Web, and only as a client for irc. It’s ages since I started using it and I have no idea about how to go about creating an account
