this post was submitted on 25 Nov 2023
58 points (88.2% liked)
Privacy
31798 readers
247 users here now
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.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don't promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
Chat rooms
-
[Matrix/Element]Dead
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
First things first, there is no app like you describe. You have to take my word for it. Let’s say a certain country’s law enforcement might be very interested in taking to me if it knew role in certain events.
I examined many messaging and chat platforms, and the closest to what you’re asking for are custom Telegram clients that go a longer way to ensure that TG’s local data gets deleted properly (by default it doesn’t, easy peasy to get data from the local DB, half cleansed chats from 6 months ago pop up in exports or even the UI, etc).”, has a built in double bottom for accounts, etc. An example of what I am talking about is here: https://github.com/wrwrabbit (check the repos yourself).
Secondly, you must understand that when the law enforcement seizes a phone, upon initial quick examination (sometimes using brutality to force you to unlock it), they will shut it down to ensure it is not connected to the Internet. And then criminalists will use a special black box device sold by an Israeli cybersec firm (its name always escapes me, but I think the product might be called Pegasus) to extract all data for offline analysis.
So thirdly, you must not rely on any app that conditionally removes data from a device. You must not entrust your well-being to it. Which leaves you basically the only choice: only ephemeral messaging capabilities which are available only when you are in the app, through the server over which you have full control.
Or your messaging sessions must take place only when you’re in a secure location. And even then you should have a “wipe all button” in case the police come after you unexpectedly.
A wipe all button is what I'm looking for. Signal is solid enough and one could potentially register without a real number sure. But ephemeral messaging isn't always the easiest to use. Sometimes keeping a chat log of say 24 hours or less before the messages disappear is nice. But if a device got lost or stolen during that time and one or both parties needed an immediate wipe on all devices its seeming not possible right now. There is no way to delete the history in a wipe all button manner regardless of platform. I'm simply looking for that feature. Matrix is nice but leaks metadata still, after reading about why it just comes down to how it operates in a defederated manner. Sure one could self host their own server and have ownership or their own data but could say the data be reset daily by restarting the server? Then would the members simply reestablish the chat again? I'm not familiar with matrix at all but I have read quite a bit today on it.
Man just settle down that what you are asking for is not available on the market off the shelf.
It’s probably not an open discussion to talk about your actual scenarios.