By making a minor concession EU governments hope to find a majority next week to approve the controversial „chat control“ bill. According to the proposed child sexual abuse regulation (CSAR), providers of messengers, e-mail and chat services would be forced to automatically search all private messag
Telegram is already not
encryptedend-to-end encrypted by default. Signal is the interesting app - they don’t even have the data to bow to data requests.I wish Signal and Whatsapp had some sort of a thing like federation so I could speak to people who won’t install anything but Whatsapp from Signal. It’s a much better experience.
You want Matrix protocol then and apps like Element.
I had Beeper. Calls don’t work.
I use Element right now, will they be affected by this new law?
In theory possibly but it’s not like EU can block it
That would be nice, but most likely that would also mean that getting every service to make changes at around the same time pretty much impossible - which would be essential when e.g. the protocol needs to be updated to deal with new threats.
But who knows; I believe the Digital Markets Act intended to achieve something like this?
Emails have been federated for ages and are fine. It’s time for messaging apps to do the same.
Emails have had major problems with federation too, despite the fact that most email standards have been unchanged or only had minor changes since the early 1980s. You just usually don’t notice so much since most of those are only a headache for mail server administrators, not so much for end users.
The vast majority of emails still aren’t end-to-end encrypted.
Of course it is encrypted by default, just not on device, but in the server side. Just like Gmail, office 365, and so many online services that are perfectly secure and that no one mentions as being a problem.
If you need End to End encryption, you have the option to use it, but being server encrypted it’s more convenient for syncing on devices and for uploading files, which I use a lot.
Sorry you’re right, I meant end-to-end encryption of course. (Gmail, Office 365, and most HTTPS websites are only encrypted in-transit though, not on the server side.)
Which is, of course, the kind of encryption that matters for this proposal. (And which I believe you don’t have the option of using in group chats on Telegram, but don’t quote me on that.) Non-end-to-end encrypted messages can already be obtained by law enforcement by coercing the service provider.
Doesn’t Signal have backdoors for government agencies or am I mistaken? (Has been a while since I read something like that.)
No
Every time somebody comes to them with warrants they got nothing but timestamps for account creation and last login
Closest thing you might be thinking of is when Signal added a warning third party keyboards might spy on you, which was promptly followed by China banning Signal (the most popular Chinese keyboard app is developed within China).
Alright, thanks for the info! Fun fact about the chinese keyboard app.
Nope
Signal or tgram. Whatever floats your boat and isn’t whatapp and co. It’s not always about encryption alone. It’s also about trust. I trust tgram and Pavel Durov. If one doesn’t, go signal & co. Perfectly valid alternative.