this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2025
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Privacy
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I dont think they can, unless they get android and iOS to do this os wide. The bigger problem is: will the public care enough to use such a messenger? Will they do it when it becomes illegal to use such a messenger? If not, mass surveillance is inevitable and those sidestepping it for important privacy reasons are easily detectable making them easy targets.
You think they could easily find out people who are using an app they can't check? How?
bully OS providers into compliance, Google/Apple knows which apps you have installed and which apps you open.
assume anyone using VPN or Tor or similar is suspicious, with deep packet inspection you can get a lot of information - even if it looks like nonsense data, you absolutely can infer patterns if you have enough data.
Pretty much every messenger is built around a central server. Tracing connections to that server is not without hassle but doable with government resources. Now, a Briar-Style P2P Network could work but that has it's own problems. Central servers are popular for a reason.
Decentralised messaging to the rescue!
You need to send a lot of metadata unencrypted for decentralised e2ee to work.
Compare metadata leak between centralised Signal (which goes to impressive lengths to know as little as possible about you) and decentralised Matrix.
That's just not true, you can obviously use encrypted communications all along, even for discovery. Why on earth would you?