Perhaps a silly question, but what do y’all with privacy-indifferent friends do for chatting? I have signal for a few friends, and telegram for my spammy computer science friend group chat, but the great majority of my friends are iMessage/SMS/Facebook contactable only (and I deleted Facebook).
How do you either convince them to switch or limit your privacy risk in chatting with them?
/e/
@jenn Not silly at all! But be ready for them not budging. If they are on Android, Signal is the best first step since you can still use SMS. Ease them into it!
I wrote a guide: https://securechatguide.org/guide_signal.html
Also send them scary articles like the ones linked here:
https://securechatguide.org/otherwebsites.html
Well, if you can convince them to use sms, then it isn't a big step to convince them that silence is a great sms client. It still lets them contact other people by sms seamlessly. If you get them using it and you're using it though... bingo! You have secure encrypted communications.
Get them to try silence. It's a really nice sms app which they can use to talk to anyone using SMS. If they use it to send messages to anyone else with silence installed though (like you!) then it seamlessly uses encrypted channels instead.
@jenn Signal is a bad idea in this situation. Those adverse to crypto won't use it, and because it subjects everyone to mulitiple varieties of mass surveillance (needlessly and foolishly) it's also unsuitable for advanced users. See https://github.com/privacytoolsIO/privacytools.io/issues/779 for the long list of issues.
@jenn As for #Facebook, the only thing better than deleting it is not signing up in the first place. There is nothing you can do to communicate to a Facebook-only user without compromising your own security and giving FB more power. If you can manage to get their email address, you can send them encrypted email by shared key. But then you have to work out a clever way to get the key to them. IIRC #protonmail and #tutanota have that capability. It's a hassle for the recipient, but rightly so
@jenn The hassle a recipient goes through to retrieve your symmetrically encrypted msg may motivate them to get a protonmail account or consult you for better options. My strategy is to never stoop to a lower level of security than I'm comfortable with. It's their duty to step up their game. There are some ppl I simply never connect with because they will not work securely and I will not give up security.
@jenn iMessage is fine security-wise (end-to-end encryption), at least much better than SMS or Facebook Messenger. I believe Signal on Android supports SMS as well so maybe you could convince some people to switch by making it their default SMS app.
Otherwise, just be careful what you say over SMS! There’s no convincing some people lol