Best privacy chat apps

[JOduMonT]

@mehdi said in Best privacy chat apps:

Olvid

Olvid sound promessing, we cloud also talk about Threema which is more or less the same but developed in Switzerland. but at the end I took my list from AlternativeTo.net and took the top 10.

Beware most of VOIP use opportunistic encryption mainly because of issues with NAT so trusting a 3rd party for that is a big mistake for your privacy.

These days everything is secure like email aka the authentication use SSL than the message follow in clear text.

It would be interesting to find how/if Olvid encrypt their VOIP and which part ANSSI complement.
for now I only see the text message being encrypted.

[mehdi]

@jodumont I am of course only talking about good end-to-end encryption, like Signal or WhatsApp (yeah, WhatsApp has many flaws, mainly their owner, but they do have good encryption).

I don't know about Telegram's encryption, I never looked into it. I just know they don't use any by default (which, in itself, is bad)

[mehdi]

@jodumont about Olvid, from what I know, yes their calls are also encrypted, but they are only available for paid users.

[JOduMonT]

@mehdi said in Best privacy chat apps:

I don't know about Telegram's encryption, I never looked into it. I just know they don't use any by default (which, in itself, is bad)

we probably don't talk about the same phase of encryption, you seams focusing on the message (which obviously it is important) and I'm talking about the transfer

anyway good thing this forum is encrypted by a SSL

[mehdi]

@jodumont This table seems to be either outdated severly, or just plain wrong. Whatsapp does use end-to-end encryption, and has been using it for years.

[JOduMonT]

@mehdi said in Best privacy chat apps:

This table seems to be either outdated severly

fair enough

[jdaviescoates]

I came across a couple of nice chat comparisons recently.

First of all there is this nice infographic by niboe.info

Sadly I've been unable to find an English version of the other nice infographic in this accompanying article of theirs in Spanish.

I also came across this handy table from DivestOS (a privacy focused Android distribution):

https://divestos.org/index.php?page=messengers

Both of these make we wish Cloudron had an XMPP server like ejabberd so we could get our friends to try out Conversations and Movim (I mean, both Yunohost and HomeLabsOS have an XMPP server, and they are both fully open source and run by volunteers - whereas Cloudron is the one with a business model and full time paid @staff - and yet they've got XMPP and we don't! )

[JOduMonT]

maybe me, but personally I make a difference when you are able to generate or add your own key to encrypt versus the "platform" provide you the public and private key

[mehdi]

@jodumont The key is always generated on your own device. There is zero reason to allow users to import an external key. If you don't trust the local app to correctly generate a keypair, you have no reason to trust it to correctly perform the encryption. So importing a key brings nothing.

[robi]

@jdaviescoates time to host an event, start packaging and get help finishing it!

[jdaviescoates]

@robi I've often thought of learning to code. I loved maths as a kid. But now isn't the time.

[robi]

@jdaviescoates there's no real coding involved.. it's mostly stitching things together and adjusting configs. You'll have help too.