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Cake day: June 18th, 2023
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XMPP is more comparable to Signal, yes.
XMPP allows unencrypted messages and leaks metadata - Signal does neither.
Signal does need (yes, need) a phone number, and most people only have one so that is identifiable info.
Signal is basically a privacy enhanced text/SMS/phone replacement. I can give my phone to someone in person and they can immediately start “texting” me on Signal - this is a feature (as well as a con to some people).
This puts it at mostly the same level as some competitors, including WhatsApp which is often advised against.
People advise against Whatsapp because while it uses Signal to encrypt message contents, they take no effort to minimize the collection of metadata - Signal’s been compelled by court to present all data it has on its users various times and the only info they have is the day/time you signed up for their services and the last day (not time) one of your clients pinged their servers - Source: https://signal.org/bigbrother/
I have yet to find any other free service that collects this little information and works just as well as a normal non-encrypted messenger. Even Signals sticker packs are end-to-end encrypted - Source: https://signal.org/blog/make-privacy-stick/
1·24 hours agoMaybe I’m confused, do the DeltaChat and ArcaneChat clients only work with DeltaChat/ArcaneChat servers?
Edit: forgot to mention I can see the sender & recipient addresses (Signal uses sealed sender to minimize this metadata leak). I can also see what time the message was sent, this is the kind of metadata Meta collects through Whatsapp even though they also encrypt message content. It doesn’t seem - although maybe it now does - that DeltaChat nor ArcaneChat support key ratcheting, so if someone’s intercepting messages they can decrypt all future + past messages. Lastly it doesn’t seem either support any kind of protection against attacks from quantum computers. Currently Signal, SimpleX and iMessage are the only clients that do protect you from these kind of attacks.
Also “Minimal metadata” says “no” while there is no personal data at all required to use ArcaneChat, accounts are fully anonymous hence what metadata and from whom?
Unfortunately email wasn never built for privacy. As DeltaChat and ArcaneChat both run on top of email, they suffer from many of the same privacy issues that have existed since the inception of email, over 50 years ago.
While Signal’s home base is the US, they are a non profit org that doesn’t operate in the same way as for-profit corporations. Also, Signal collects basically zero data so there’s no incentive to sell out, and who would want to buy them anyway when they have no data and the server and client are open source.
Matrix is great, but I wouldn’t compare it to Signal. I use both for very different purposes.
I know what the servers do. My question is direct, because it would answer an important detail that has been left unanswered. Can the chat clients work with any email provider or only Delta/Arcane configured email servers? Because if they work with any email provider, people are going to shoot themselves in the foot by allowing insecure servers. If its the latter, then at least the clients enforce some safeguards.
And until its done, its leaking metadata.
A lot of security is based on theoretical attack vectors. This is why security is hard, you have to invest time and effort to secure areas that could be exploited at some point in the future, not just what we know today. It’s why Signal and Apple have developed and enabled quantum-resistant encryption in their messaging platforms (Source).
Considering people get hacked left and right all the time and the constant barrage of breaches, not the highest bar set.