this post was submitted on 27 Jan 2022
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Privacy
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I would not use either of them.
Currently, a better solution, for me, is Element/Matrix, because the crypto is mostly OK and there is federation. And it is quite featureful.
what about the metadata leaking ?
Yes. Element is known to leak metadata.
That's a problem. But federation at least helps by giving you the choice of who will see these metadata leaks.
Not if you're in a group chat with someone from that instance
The most that instance gets is a user name. With signal, or telegram, they get your real identity via your phone #.
That's unfortunately not true. Lots of data in matrix is currently unencrypted. Message content is but state events (like the room topic), reactions, stickers (if your client supports them) are not.
This is slowly improving (the proposal for encrypted state events is going to be a significant improvement) but unfortunately strong privacy doesn't seem like a strong priority of the spec owners.
If it was up to me I would block every new proposal until it had a strong privacy proposal, but instead their plan is to implement everything insecurely first. Then they will try to get people to propose private versions of the specs and try to drive adoption of those. Not a great plan for something that advertises itself as "an open network for secure, decentralized communication" if you ask me.
While true, it is also true that Matrix never claimed to be especially private. What ever your definition of "secure" and "decentralized" it is not the same as "privacy".
Matrix is mostly about censorship resilience and distributed networks.
Thank you. I did not know that the state events were not encrypted. That's very unfortunate. I think I still prefer Element/Matrix over Signal, but slightly less than before your message 👍
Yeah, that is what bugs me most about this. They are adding new features and all the clients say "Your conversation is encrypted" but a lot of information isn't. I also prefer Matrix but I do wish that they would put a higher value or privacy when evolving the spec.