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.

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How good you feel good about your privacy using apps such as Signal? (lemmy.wtf)

submitted 2 months ago by chappedafloat@lemmy.wtf to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

93 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Convincing people to use apps such as Signal is hard work and most can't be convinced. But with those you manage to convince, do you feel happy to talk to them on Signal?

The problem is these people use Signal on Android/IOS which can't be trusted and IOS has recently been in the news for having a backdoor. And it has also been revealed that american feds are able to read everyone's push notifications and they do this as mass surveillance.

So not only do you have to convince people to use Signal which is an incredibly difficult challenge. You also have to convince them to go into settings to disable message and sender being included in the push notifications. And then there's the big question is the Android and IOS operating systems are doing mass surveillance anyway. And many people find it taking a lot of effort to type on the phone so they install Signal on the computer which is a mac or Windows OS.

So I don't think I feel comfortable sending messages in Signal but it's better than Whatsapp.

These were some thoughts to get the discussion started and set the context.

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[–] chappedafloat@lemmy.wtf 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I think a big part of it comes down to what threats are there in theory and what threats are there actually. The problem is that the theoretical threats are possible, they're not unrealistic and that's why it doesn't feel good to not be protected against the theoretical threats but we maybe need to try and accept they are too unlikely to be active threats. Trying to protect from theoretical threats is kind of like trying to protect your house from having an airplane fall down from the sky into your house. Or maybe this is just my trying to cope.

And how do we know what threats are theoretical vs active threats? Just have to keep learning and learning, it takes a long time. Talking in privacy and security communities can help speed up the learning.

[–] EngineerGaming@feddit.nl 1 points 2 months ago

Yeah, I fully agree! Point was different though... How does it relate to your statement of "there is no privacy on the internet"? Such awareness might help gain said privacy in each area, from different threats.