Hey, everyone. If you’re looking for a fresh privacy podcast, we recently started a new one called Signal Jam.
Here’s a bit about why we made Signal Jam and what we’re hoping to do differently.
We even have preliminary ways for you to participate in the project, which you can read about here.
Feel free to connect with us on Proton, Tuta, Signal, or here on Lemmy. Looking forward to your feedback and thoughts!
Cool idea and will check it out later. I also found a small grammatical error.
While we
trystrive to make original content and refresh old topics, we can’t cover everything, and we can’t be everywhere.I assume you would want to strike “try”, but I suppose you could strike “strive” instead.
Edit - I made a word salad on a post about a grammatical error, go me!
Funny how sometimes you miss silly things like this even after proofreading so many times… thank you! Fixed. 🙂
What alternatives would you recommend?
Matrix is open source, should give that a try,
it could be a bit more user friendly tho
The fact that Matrix was developed in Israel instantly kills it for me.
Pretty sure it was developed in germany
No Matrix was developed by Amdocs, an Israeli company. It has moved to Europe afterwards (I recall UK but might be wrong about that part)
Element is a Matrix client.
are you sure? I thought that it is just developed by former amdocs employees, started after they left
Hey, Arthur— thanks for dropping these links. Jay and I will look at these and consider your thought process, and might reach out to follow up, if that’s okay! If I may ask, what do you prefer for email and RTC?
-M
For chat, something with e2ee and without phone numbers or centralized metadata. SimpleX, Matrix, XMPP, etc - each have their own problems, but at least they aren’t centralizing everyone’s metadata with a CIA contractor like Jeff Bezos like Signal is.
For email, I’d recommend finding small-to-medium-sized operators who seem both honest and competent. Anyone offering snakeoil privacy features such as browser-based e2ee is failing in at least one of those two categories.
We’re considering moving up our timeline on a SimpleX and Matrix chat as we’ve received interest from others about that, too. Keep an eye on our website or show notes as we’ll update those when new chat channels open up.
As for email, are there specific providers you recommend we look at?
-M
I think signal, proton and tuta are totally fine for most peoples threat model unless they feel they need the extra privacy.
If we want everyone to value privacy then we need to onboard them with easy to use and accessible services first and then they can take steps further if they want.
I only read the signal link you posted, but the first link inside it complains that the signal server needs to know a users ip and that could be used to connect people and users. Ip addresses are required to send data. Ip obfuscation is insanely out of scope for a messenger.
The second link complains about sealed sender not failing closed which is true (or was true at the time) but also a reasonable compromise to prevent abuse and avoid it constantly failing and requiring new expirable tokens.
These are not reasons to not use or even not recommend signal. A person who is taking recommendations to increase their privacy should not be worried about those concerns.
Removing oneself from public records (or taking greater control over what surfaces in public records about oneself) is infinitely more important than expecting ip obfuscation or sealed sender from signal.
I am not making this reply to start an argument and will not engage in one. The point is to help readers understand that your concerns about signal are esoteric.
more important than expecting ip obfuscation or sealed sender from signal
People are only expecting metadata protection (which is what “sealed sender”, a term Signal themselves created, purports to do) because Signal dishonestly says they are providing it. The fact that they implemented this feature in their protocol is one of the reasons they should be distrusted.
For anyone reading along, that means people you send signal messages to can see your user account name maybe even if you click the button that’s supposed to make it not possible to do that.
Change your behavior accordingly.
This looks cool. Thank you for creating and sharing! I’ve added to my (privacy-respecting, I think) podcast app of choice and will give a listen.
Thanks for following! Out of curiosity, what’s your preferred podcast client?
Well I just went down the rabbit hole to verify that my podcast app is simply that, and not tracking tons of data to send back to who knows where. I had been using Overcast but a few months ago changed to RSS Radio after reading a recommendation - perhaps on Reddit? RSS Radio now seems to be all but disavowed by both Dorada Software, who links from the site for it, and Maple Media Apps, LLC, who is the publisher on the app store. The app privacy cards on the iOS App Store do not instill a ton of confidence, showing: Data Used to Track You (Identifiers, Usage Data) and Data Linked to You (Usage Data)
Perhaps it’s time to switch… Podverse is at least open source, although they track Usage Data and link Contact Info to you. But good ol’ Overcast only has a card for Data Not Linked to You, which seems like a big improvement.
AntennaPod is the obligatory open source client.
I’m still on iOS (I know - don’t yell at me) but thinking to make moves soon. I trust Android less than iOS, but perhaps GrapheneOS or something else will be for me. I’m always open to recommendations (with a minimum of yelling).
anytime has an ios app!
The holy Data Not Collected card!
