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Most of us expect our private messages to remain, well, private.
Is your messaging provider storing all your texts unencrypted on their servers?
Well, adata breachmeans its all now in the hands of hackers.
Government surveillance seeks to constantly undermine your right to private communication.
Corporate data mining tries to infer every last thing about your preferences from the way you message your friends.
Lets see:
WhatsAppWhatsApp is one of the worlds most widely used messaging apps.
Its estimated that there are nearly 3 billion unique users on WhatsApp.
Thats a lot of messages to spy on.
Messages are encrypted before they leave the gear, and are only unencrypted after they reach the recipient gear.
When you sign up for WhatsApp, you must register with a phone number.
Theres also the thorny issue ofmetadata.
SignalSignalis pretty well-regarded as the first choice if youre worried about privacy.
The team behind it has built a reputation as one of the most secure messaging platforms.
Being open-source means that you’re able to audit the code for yourself but you wont need to.
Signal has already commissioned multiple third-party audits from various security organizations to confirm its apps are secure.
Signal also minimizes data collection.
Unlike WhatsApp, Signal doesnt store metadata that could reveal your communication patterns.
In fact, Signal doesnt even store yourIP address.
With so much to like, are there really any downsides?
The privacy issue with Burner is that it is a paid service.
TelegramTelegramis a halfway house between Signal and WhatsApp.
However, its default chats are not encrypted end-to-end, leaving them vulnerable to interception through the Telegram servers.
Telegram is also open-source… sort of.
There are also several other privacy issues with Telegram.
As of 2024, Telegram now hands over IP addresses and phone numbers in response to law enforcement requests.
