I am soon moving out for university and am going to meet a bunch of new folks. But I was wondering how do you go about approaching this with privacy in mind?
It is a little bit whonky to ask someone you just met to download Signal, if it is a group of people then it is more acceptable, or like how do you keep in contact if they don’t use any of the messaging platforms you use such as Signal and Telegram, and if you don’t use any of the ones they use such as Whatsapp or Instagram DMs (yes zoomers in the US use these) or Snapchat? Do you just use SMS where videos are absolute shit quality and you have no privacy there either?
Let me know how you deal with this issue.
All the new people I’ve met since moving have only been in contact with me via sms. The only exception was when I was forced to install whatsapp to join a group chat to schedule casual basketball games. Then again I’m an older millennial and the people I meet often enough to exchange numbers with aren’t into social media that much either, so no friend requests and adding each other on social media. Just plain old sms if people want to meet up.
But keep in mind that sms is not encrypted.
Sure. But as I said, those sms messages are just “hey, wanna go to x next weekend?” types of communication. Yeah it’s giving out your potential location at a given time, but my risk profile is not at the level where I have to hide my location from someone who is interested enough to intercept my text messages to find out my location.