this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2026
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The EU wants to decrease reliance on American technology. Hereโ€™s what happened when a POLITICO reporter tried to live and work without it.

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[โ€“] vogi@piefed.social 19 points 2 days ago (3 children)

I kinda feel like all dumb phones have to do is ship with an Signal client, the lack of WhatsApp was apparently the driving reason why the reporter went back and I think its more reasonable to expect friends to move to Signal than to SMS. (Its also really unsecure)
There are a couple of community made clients I wonder how hard it is to implement the signal protocol.

[โ€“] jabjoe@feddit.uk 1 points 1 day ago

It's open. Just compile your own client. Though it's be allowed on the Signal network. So you have speed up a server too. American and open isn't a problem.

[โ€“] colourlessidea@sopuli.xyz 6 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Signal is American too though

[โ€“] vogi@piefed.social 2 points 1 day ago

I mean tbh it feels like the EU is putting more pressure on private chats than America does, at least right now. I am not sure how things are in Asia. I think the bigger problem is their reliance on AWS if Bezos or some friend of his does not want Signal to be a thing they can probably just switch it off fairly easy.

[โ€“] Europellinore@europe.pub 3 points 1 day ago

True, but itโ€™s not owned by privacy enemy and trump slave Zuckerberg, or a similar big tech bro

[โ€“] ranzispa@mander.xyz 2 points 2 days ago (2 children)

To be fair, I recently discovered RCS messages. Very cool. I've been using those quite a bit recently and with many people I do not need Whatsapp anymore.

[โ€“] vogi@piefed.social 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I did try RCS with a couple of friends and its great.

The only problem I have with it is the same I have with WhatsApp is that I cannot make sure what is happening on the server side (or even on the client side for that matter if its closed source) and what they are doing with the meta data. It seems like they would still be able to map out with whom I talk to and when (even if the content is encrypted which is not the default with RCS i believe).

[โ€“] ranzispa@mander.xyz 1 points 1 day ago

Messages are end to end encrypted, I believe it is by default.

Google definitely has some metadata if you use the android app, at the very least the list of your contacts.

Regarding who you talk to, maybe: messages do not necessarily go through the servers of Google, it depends whether your carrier has their own servers.

Either way, I do see this as a great advantage over Whatsapp: while this system is still mostly controlled by Google the underlying technology most definitely is designed for decentralization and I know quite a few carriers are beginning to support it.

[โ€“] tramdan@piefed.social 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

You can't use RCS without Google, though.

[โ€“] ranzispa@mander.xyz 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Can't use WhatsApp without Meta. What's your point?

[โ€“] tramdan@piefed.social 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

The point is not relying on US tech. It's in the title.

[โ€“] ranzispa@mander.xyz 1 points 1 day ago

The person went back to the smartphone in order to use WhatsApp. I feel RCS is a better option as it doesn't strictly need Google, the reason why it is google is that google has developed the only application which supports RCS.