Privacy Guides
In the digital age, protecting your personal information might seem like an impossible task. We’re here to help.
This is a community for sharing news about privacy, posting information about cool privacy tools and services, and getting advice about your privacy journey.
You can subscribe to this community from any Kbin or Lemmy instance:
Check out our website at privacyguides.org before asking your questions here. We've tried answering the common questions and recommendations there!
Want to get involved? The website is open-source on GitHub, and your help would be appreciated!
This community is the "official" Privacy Guides community on Lemmy, which can be verified here. Other "Privacy Guides" communities on other Lemmy servers are not moderated by this team or associated with the website.
Moderation Rules:
- We prefer posting about open-source software whenever possible.
- This is not the place for self-promotion if you are not listed on privacyguides.org. If you want to be listed, make a suggestion on our forum first.
- No soliciting engagement: Don't ask for upvotes, follows, etc.
- Surveys, Fundraising, and Petitions must be pre-approved by the mod team.
- Be civil, no violence, hate speech. Assume people here are posting in good faith.
- Don't repost topics which have already been covered here.
- News posts must be related to privacy and security, and your post title must match the article headline exactly. Do not editorialize titles, you can post your opinions in the post body or a comment.
- Memes/images/video posts that could be summarized as text explanations should not be posted. Infographics and conference talks from reputable sources are acceptable.
- No help vampires: This is not a tech support subreddit, don't abuse our community's willingness to help. Questions related to privacy, security or privacy/security related software and their configurations are acceptable.
- No misinformation: Extraordinary claims must be matched with evidence.
- Do not post about VPNs or cryptocurrencies which are not listed on privacyguides.org. See Rule 2 for info on adding new recommendations to the website.
- General guides or software lists are not permitted. Original sources and research about specific topics are allowed as long as they are high quality and factual. We are not providing a platform for poorly-vetted, out-of-date or conflicting recommendations.
Additional Resources:
- EFF: Surveillance Self-Defense
- Consumer Reports Security Planner
- Jonah Aragon (YouTube)
- r/Privacy
- Big Ass Data Broker Opt-Out List
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Element isn't perfect, but what's a better alternative? A giant Signal group would be a horrible idea, since everyone's phone numbers would be exposed to the other members (plus there's a 150 group member limit), and Discord is obviously much worse than Element (from a privacy perspective).
@sp6 oh i'm not suggesting Signal, though i trust it and use a FOSS client version of it. i agree with you there and would never pitch Discord either, but Element seems much more open to data leakage (bc of the bridges feature) than any other platform and lacks true decentralization (since everyone just uses the main homeserver) and ephemeral messaging, which makes it a non-starter for me.
i think Briar, Cwtch, Session, Simplex, and Tox are where we should be looking, no? or even @syphon over Element if Matrix is what we're set on using (based on privacy policy).
Just a quick glance at all of those:
-Briar, Tox, and Cwtch don't have iOS clients
-SimpleX ~~doesn't have a desktop GUI~~ has issues with big groups (see comment below)
-Session has a 100-person group chat limit
-Syphon's own github states they are "still in alpha and we do not recommend using it where proven and independently verified security is required." Plus, they haven't had a release in over a year, so I'm not sure it's still maintained.
Element (or most Matrix clients) don't have any of those issues. Like I said, it's not perfect, but I see why it's recommended. All decent alternatives have significant downsides
Bridges only work in rooms that aren’t encrypted, I think.
Some bridges support encryption and even if they don't there's a tool to make it so they do pantalaimon
Everyone doesn't use the main HS sure it is alot of people but alot also don't use it