Privacy

32722 readers

1011 users here now

A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.

Some Rules

Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
Don't promote proprietary software
Try to keep things on topic
If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
Be nice :)

Related communities

much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

Telegram Hands U.S. Authorities Data on Thousands of Users (www.404media.co)

submitted 6 days ago by yogthos@lemmy.ml to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

114 comments fedilink hide all child comments

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] pupbiru@aussie.zone 1 points 4 days ago (1 children)

that’s all not necessarily true

for starters: https://signal.org/blog/sealed-sender/

but also perhaps more academically because signal (i believe) doesn’t do this, so it’s more a comment on the information that the server “must know”

signal uses the double ratchet protocol to derive shared keys between users already. if we extend this a little further to exchange a separate shared identifier for use in retrieving conversaiton data, and a place to store that data the the only information that the server gets is a couple of initialisation messages, and the rest is entirely opaque - there’s no way to know (other than tracing e2e messages based on IP address, and there are mitigations for that too) who is communicating with who, at what rate, etc

there are other ways to validate things like rate limits, etc that don’t involve identity directly, or at least don’t trust any single party with all data

[–] yogthos@lemmy.ml 2 points 4 days ago

If you're arguing that it is possible to build a system that uses a server for routing while keeping clients anonymous, then that is the case. However, what we're talking about here is whether a malicious actor would be able to intentionally harvest metadata about the users. And my point was that since only the people operating the Signal server know what it's actually doing, it becomes a trust based system. You have to trust that Whisper Systems is a good actor and they're not harvesting your information.