I made a spreadsheet that ranks messengers for privacy
I made a spreadsheet that ranks messengers for privacy
I've been working really hard to research and rank messaging apps by their privacy. The more green boxes the better.
I plan to turn PrivacySpreadsheet.com into a place for privacy data on everything from cars to video games. It's all open source too on GitHub.
Not trying to advertise, I just put a lot of time into researching all this, and I want to share it since I think others could benefit.
The is the messenger matrix from the German blog Kukitz-Blog (it is a blog with a strong focus on privacy and is in my opinion well informed). But no worries, the matrix is also available in English.
Maybe you can take some inspiration from the matrix.
it would be more usable if the left column were locked so you don’t lose it when scrolling horizontally. Same for the top row.
“Email / Phone required for signup” ← these are on two very different levels of intrusiveness.. really needs to split into two rows. And from there, it’s interesting to know whether a phone must be a mobile phone or not. With email, it’s interesting to know if disposable addresses are blocked or not.
Also, for “decentralized network” for #Signal, you simply have “no”. I would change that to “No (Amazon)” to inform people they are feeding Amazon by using Signal.
In fact I suggest also adding a row: “feeds a tech giant” because privacy from tech giants is not the only factor -- some of us trying to live ethically do not want to even feed privacy offending tech giants, such as:
- Amazon
- Microsoft
- Cloudflare
- Apple
And as someone else pointed out, Delta Chat is missing.
why not put this on Wikipedia? Theres already a great article there that would benefit from this additional data
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_cross-platform_instant_messaging_clients
Nice work. Can you add RCS to the table? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Communication_Services
This is worthy of a more usable interface than this spreadsheet widget.
It took me a fair bit of scrolling to identify which attributes each of the six purple "N/A" values for SimpleX are, but now that I have I agree they're accurate (though I think there is an argument to be made for just writing a green "no" for each of them).
It is noteworthy that SimpleX is currently the only one of these (currently 34) messengers to not have a single red or yellow cell in its column. well done, @epoberezkin@lemmy.ml! 😀
edit: istm that SimpleX (along with several other things) getting a "no" in the "can hand IP address to the police" row is not really accurate. SimpleX does better than many things here in that they don't have a lot of other info to give to the police along with the IP, but, if Bob has their phone seized (or remotely compromised) and then the police reading Alice and Bob's messages from Bob's phone want to know Alice's IP address... they can compel a server operator to give it to them. (And it is the same for a user who posts a SimpleX contact link publicly.)
Thanks for this, I like the idea.
This makes me feel things. Incredible.
Deltachat?!
It's got that telegram is funded by Russia, is that true?
Wikipedia says the opposite.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telegram_(software)
Telegram was launched in 2013 by the brothers Nikolai and Pavel Durov. Previously, the pair founded the Russian social network VK, which they left in 2014, saying it had been taken over by the government. Pavel sold his remaining stake in VK and left Russia after resisting government pressure.
The messaging app front I consider to be a long-term stalemate, mainly due to crippling network effects. Another factor is that strange psychology at play when making app decisions, where a person will have page after page of junk apps on their phones, yet utterly balks at the notion of installing a second messenger.
Even if a large actor (say, the EU?) managed to bruteforce some interoperability into being, I wonder whether that would be to the detriment of small apps in terms of undermining (or even eliminating) their privacy protections. I can use the likes of Session or Simplex all day long, but if the other side of the conversation is on a corporate product like Whatsapp... It runs into the same problem as email.
The first row and first column should stay visible when you scroll with such a dense graph.
This is a really cool idea, will share it around!
Maybe add the website on the GitHub-Repo as the projetc-site URL, makes it easier to navigate.
Provider is funded by authoritarian regimes
💀
What are you using to create this read-only spreadsheet?
Very nicely done, thanks
Thx for the effort 🙏, the repo looks very interesting gonna have a look later
Love your commitment but I already knew SimpleX is the best. 🙃
Wow, that's amazing, It's huge! A staggering amount of work has gone into that, well done!
Really cool, but could you maybe use commments for the first column huge cells?
It would be great 8f you could make a simpler table that's easier to parse, just to get a quick overview of how each platform stacks up
Not sure, but I couldn't find Tox (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tox_(protocol)) anywhere?
fed it to gpt:
Briar and Cwtch stand out as recommended for private communication, both featuring end-to-end encryption by default, utilization of Perfect Forward Secrecy, and encryption at rest on both server and client sides. They are also decentralized and not dependent on DNS, which enhances privacy and security.
@UnHidden
A Mastodon post linking to a Lemmy post linking to a GitHub with no info worth only a .com website link leftDidn't know my patience can be used up before seeing anything worthwhile
(And frankly, I would still bet the ranking somehow confuses privacy with anonymity)