this post was submitted on 01 Jan 2025
139 points (95.4% liked)
Privacy
32615 readers
1231 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
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
The majority of users on Lemmy are probably not from India, I would say our userbase skews US/Europe.
This is a very, very interesting and important story, if it's true.
Do you have any other evidence of this happening? It's okay if your sources are not in English, that's just the nature of local media, it speaks the local language.
Would love to hear more about this from your perspective, @Ritsu4Life@lemmy.world because this is a big, important issue that needs discussion if it's really happening. Please expand your thoughts and any evidence you may have in the comments section, please and thank you.
Finally, thank you for bringing this to our attention at all. Cheers.
Thanks for the comment. I haven't found any local news for this. I may update this once I find any
And for my story: A guy came from the police station he had a list all the people who were using "signal, element and bip (not open source, full of ads but encrypted) and a buch more end to end encrypted apps. Shown my mobile number, address and my name.
Told me why I was using signal and element and also had to show my chats. Didn't look at all the chats, was curious tho.
Said that these apps were used by terrorist and all and you should switch to WhatsApp.
WhatsApp runs India. It is a backbone all Indian users and it is also e2ee for all I know
That's very curious. The push to WhatsApp is especially interesting considering it is owned by Meta/Facebook, which is a company that has a long history of working with the US government for extrajudicial surveillance of the US populace. I wonder if they're working with the Indian government in a similar capacity.
As such, I fully personally expect WhatsApp to have officially sanctioned government backdoors. If they're willing to build them for the US government, maybe they're building them for the Indian government, too. Which is perhaps why there is a push towards the corporate, non-open solution, because the other options have more ways for individuals to avoid backdoors.
We really need more community owned and operated communications groups, like the barbed wire telephone of the past.
There could be another reason for pushing towards WhatsApp. If the police have operatives in anti government protest groups only on a single platform, they already know everyone in them via their phone numbers and can monitor them more easily. Signal in contrast has the option to hide your phone number and only expose a username to the public.
don't worry, the app of all participants knows all the numbers, they just dont show them on the UI. a patched app will show them just as well
https://community.signalusers.org/t/beta-feedback-for-the-upcoming-android-7-0-release/59024/51
the feature got implemented in this commit: https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/commit/bb30535afb79c8570fc7aa75b56d03892be6b70f
The only people I know who use WhatsApp are Indian. The only reason I have ever used WhatsApp is many of my Indian friends are unreachable by any normal means. And it was that way since before Meta ever bought them. If Modi tried to completely eliminate WhatsApp than people would be upset about it.
WhatsApp is the most commonly used messaging app globally. What would be considered 'normal' means here? SMS or iMessage?
Good point. I would consider SMS, MMS, Phone call & email "normal" but it woulda probably been better if I used a different term, maybe "long established protocols?"
WhatsApp, Instagram and Discord are used by terrorists, iOS and Windows too.
Join the police. Make all your friends join the police. Report your new boss for terrorism.
Probably just skimmed through the group names looking for something like "Anti-Modi Protest Group".
I wonder how they'd detect their usage. Signal is understandable, it has central servers (although I thought they were blocked and thus their usage wouldn't be detectable under a good VPN anyway). But Matrix? Are they looking for connections to known public servers? Or the usage of the protocol itself stands out so that even selfhosted servers would stand out?
If I were in such a situation, I'd start to hide traffic to anything they might dislike anyway.
That is very concerning. I always chuckle to myself whenever I hear this "terrorist" pov thrown around. Like, okay? So many things are used by terrorists, let's just ban them all! It's like when a bill shows up in the US with the aim of "protecting children" (read: increasing surveillance and taking away your privacy)
Btw if you don't mind me asking, which state are you from? I'm from the North and I've not heard of this till now. Would love to know. Stay safe out there man, India is going through a lot of shit right now.
*aussie.zone has entered the chat*
(did you also know our instance admins are Australian?)
I would have never guessed that...😂😂😂
That the Blahaj admins are aussie? x3
Fancy seeing 'Straya here!