IE like Crypto AG:
In 2020, it was revealed that the Swiss company, Crypto AG, which provided secure communications services to ~120 governments throughout the 20th century, was secretly ran by the CIA and West German Intelligence. The CIA and later NSA were able to read encrypted communications for many countries such as Saudi Arabia, Iran, Italy, Indonesia, Iraq, Libya, Jordan and South Korea.
All of the “delete my information from data brokers” services IMO, especially the ones that advertise on YouTube. Always smelled fishy to me.
Either that or they’re just more data brokers trying to get exclusivity.
Probably various VPNs on the market
Especially Israeli owned VPNs. Which seems to be most of them lately.
Most likely all free vpns
Israeli actually, like express VPN
Dating apps.
Signal I think. I don’t mean that the end2end algorithm or messaging itself are itself unsafe, the algo has been shown to be secure. This is what people usually rebuke this with, with the reminder of Signal’s OSS nature.
The issue the servers and the social networking data that can be harvested. The server code only partially exists in public and we just have to trust that that is actually what is running on whatever AWS server without tampering and self hosting is nearly impossible in practice if technically possible and nobody does it. The social network data (who talks to who) is more valuable than the actual messages logs, which give a massive, but mainly useless datasets. Until LLMs, like 10-15 years ago they were basically impossible to parse for any useful info without using large quantities of eye pairs. Basically if you are an organizer, criminal, government, part of a hunted opposition, you will leak the whole core group structure of your org with attached phone numbers. Whoever with that data can then target their devices and persons with other means. Plus it’s literally built on top of CIA money. I think signal is totally safe and adequate for friends and family type of use, but not much else, but then all in all so is whatsapp, mostly since signal and Whattsapp share the same end to end algorithm.
I know your example is the opposite, but any service that is run and hosted in the US.
It’s one of the major issues with Signal.
Not to mention Graphite and Pegasus, Israeli spyware.
When parliaments have to inquire their own spy services, it’s a sign that these spy services must be disbanded, as they are becoming a deep state of their own, intimidating and harassing politicians. After all, if you can’t trust your own politicians, whom can you? And that’s problematic.
Disbanding those services and prohibiting any secret services from ever forming, would also regain a great deal of trust of society in each other. And that trust in turn, can foster society to advance for mankind.
This thread basically illustrates the challenges for a beginner, such as myself.
I’ve been locked into the Google ecosystem for nearly two decades and am now trying to free myself.
I’d like to migrate to a hybrid solution that involves self-hosted NextCloud synchronized with a cloud provider that I can trust more than Google.
However:
Proton apparently makes false, or at least misleading, marketing claims and doesn’t fight a vast majority of its inbound government requests.
Tuta has been publicly accused by a member of the intelligence community of being a honeypot.
The rest of the email providers seem to implement even fewer protections, relative to these two.
So, what’s a guy to do?
Now, to be clear, I’m not saying that either of these companies are bad or that I believe that they’re actually honeypots. I’m just trying to illustrate the challenges faced by newcomers (and probably all of us).
While I’d prefer to absolutely maximize privacy and security on all fronts, given that my first goal is de-googling, I will probably start with Proton and NextCloud and re-evaluate from there, but I’m open to suggestions.
Thank you all – I really appreciate this community.
Be careful of accepting some of the criticism of Signal in this thread. For most of us, we have to make choices about secure comms from subject matter experts. Almost all the criticism I see of Signal comes from anonymous or otherwise random users online. If you believe in such a thing as expertise, please seek it out when evaluating something like this.
Who are the experts, and who pays their salaries? Crypto AG wasn’t lacking in experts.
You’ll have to make your own determinations I guess, but be careful if you find yourself dismissing expertise in favor of opinion or motivated reasoning.
It is absolutely irrelevant who makes the criticism, what needs to be addressed is the criticism itself. If somebody gives you advice to simply trust people blindly then you should be very suspicious of their motivations.
Not a privacy app, but you should definitely not think anything said on discord is private in any sense whatsoever
beyond the obvious ones? signal.
proton is sus af with the fascist connections too, now that more of that news have come out lmao
Bitcoin.
Hell, monero is the only crypto I think isn’t a honeypot, since so many exchanges refuse to list it. That could just be how the government wants us to think though 🤔
It’s not even that Bitcoin is a honeypot, it’s that it isn’t actually private at all, and through good ol detective work a wallet can be connected to a person, as well as their inflows and outflows and what wallets they’re sending or receiving money from.
