181–190 of 1001 posts
FB: If we're not allowed to track you across the web, we'll use your data captured via our properties to make more money from you via targetted advertising. Users: whatever.
I'd like to move my family off of WhatsApp due to these concerns. I've used Signal before, but I am not a big fan of it. I often have to re-register my devices to sign in, syncing takes a long time, and conversations do not persist across devices. I am perfectly happy using a paid service. Does anyone here think Discord or Slack would be a suitable replacement?
Try Telegram. It’s as easy to use as WhatsApp for non-tech family and friends, yet has all the features you want out of an IM without too much of the bloat. It has native apps on all major platforms, and for the techies it has a solid API so you can do fun stuff like write your own bots.
Except default E2E (which WhatsApp, Signal, Wire, Threema etc. do provide).
Signal and Telegram seem to be the most commonly mentioned alternatives here. Which one do you prefer and why?
Also, FYI, Telegram is going to introduce some paid features soon, but it's not completely clear what they'll be. There just was some talking about that's it about the time they are going to monetize it, but I'm not sure if they announced what exactly becomes paid and what doesn't.
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Users want centralized services. Syncing across devices and shared history are mandatory features, and are basically impossible to do well in distributed models.
I have never lost a matrix message (but I am fed up with e2e warning and new session weird insecure messages) but I have come to the conclusion than Signal isn't reliable since it sometimes lose messages. It's no-no.
Once again - Signal[0] as an alternative. It's fully Open-Source (including the backend) and their crypto is public and independently verified[1][2][3]... [0] https://signal.org/en/ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signal_(software)#Encryption_p ... [2] https://threatpost.com/signal-audit-reveals-protocol-cryptog ... [3] https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/1013.pdf [PDF]
Stop promoting services with no federation, they'll just end up in the same spot 10 years from now. EDIT: To the people downvoting this: I said the same thing a long time ago about whatsapp before Facebook bought them.
However I'd also promote federation-first services like Matrix. Only issue with Matrix is the e2e being so clumsy IMO
How about pay $1 / year to opt out of all data sharing? I foolishly installed the Facebook app on Android for a while. When I asked for a data dump from Facebook I was amazed at the amount of data it had stolen from my phone, including full contacts list. It sounds like that is exactly what Facebook are planning with WhatsApp. I'd pay $1 / year to opt out of that and be the customer rather than the product.
$1 a year is super low. YouTube values their ads at approximately $12 a month[0] - FB can’t be much less. (E: 12, not 18. 18 is for families) 0: https://YouTube.com/premium
If I make $1/mo/per user from adverts, but my conversion rate is 1/12 at $12/mo, then I'm making $23 for every 12 users.
Doesn't mean I make $12/user/month.
FB: If we're not allowed to track you across the web, we'll use your data captured via our properties to make more money from you via targetted advertising. Users: whatever.
fun fact: they also collect data from apps they don't own but which use Facebook SDK. eg. Opera, Duolingo, Kayak and tons of others. So deleting Facebook app and Facebook account doesn't do much as you think it's does.
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Telegram is only end-to-end encrypted in a feature called secret chats. Groups and channels and individual chats are not end-to-end encrypted. In other words, Telegram doesn't even deserve to be in the same conversation. Even if it had the best encryption out there (however you define that), that wouldn't mean anything when it's not used in like 98% of the cases (percentage pulled out of my ass). It's like comparing…
Telegram not having e2e by default is a feature; It allows great multi-device usage.
Once again - Signal[0] as an alternative. It's fully Open-Source (including the backend) and their crypto is public and independently verified[1][2][3]... [0] https://signal.org/en/ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signal_(software)#Encryption_p ... [2] https://threatpost.com/signal-audit-reveals-protocol-cryptog ... [3] https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/1013.pdf [PDF]
Stop promoting services with no federation, they'll just end up in the same spot 10 years from now. EDIT: To the people downvoting this: I said the same thing a long time ago about whatsapp before Facebook bought them.
Even moving from Fb to Telegram is an improvement in almost all respects and it's sure as hell a lot easier to do than going straight to Matrix/Riot/whatever it is these days. Don't be a purist and let people have their compromises, lest you end up like the "GNU/" part in front of "Linux".
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From the opposite point of view, in the last hour I’ve been added to 3 different group chats on Signal that were all previously WhatsApp chats (in which I did not participate, in spite of many of those friends repeatedly asking me to). That’s added at least 20 or 30 friends/acquaintances into my signal contact list that I’m 99% sure downloaded signal for the first time this morning.
Why not just use SMS/iMessage groups ?