I’ve been working really hard to research and rank messaging apps by their privacy. The more green boxes the better.

I plan to turn PrivacySpreadsheet.com into a place for privacy data on everything from cars to video games. It’s all open source too on GitHub.

Not trying to advertise, I just put a lot of time into researching all this, and I want to share it since I think others could benefit.

  • Cralder@lemmy.worldEnglish
    52·
    10 months ago

    Bro put Tinder DMs on the list. Points for being thorough I guess lol.

    Jokes aside looks really useful. Good job!

    • UnHidden@lemmy.worldOP
      34·
      10 months ago

      I forgot Grindr DMs, but you already know that ones gonna be red all the way down lmao

      Pls share with friends if you find it useful, I dont accept donations or anything, and it’ll never have ads or bullshit.

      I’m working on adding more services, but each one takes about 4 hours to research and review.

  • Moritz@lemmy.worldEnglish
    23·
    10 months ago

    The is the messenger matrix from the German blog Kukitz-Blog (it is a blog with a strong focus on privacy and is in my opinion well informed). But no worries, the matrix is also available in English.

    Maybe you can take some inspiration from the matrix.

  • /home/pineapplelover@lemm.ee
    22·
    10 months ago

    The issue with me is ease of use to use with other people. I’ve tried Matrix and Session with other tech minded people and it’s not nearly as seemless as Signal. I’m just waiting for an app that ticks all my boxes, really looking forward to Signal usernames though.

    • BlanK0@lemmy.ml
      14·
      10 months ago

      Signal really is that better replacement for WhatsApp since the functionality is identical, others would have to force people to get used to the different ui and the options.

      • BearOfaTime@lemm.ee
        105·
        10 months ago

        Except Signal UI is… Not good. It feels like using a texting app.

        Between the UI and dropping SMS support, I can’t get anyone to use it anymore, and people I had using it have moved on.

        Dropping SMS is really frustrating - it was the big selling point I had.

        • ry_@lemmy.ml
          31·
          10 months ago

          I’m one of those people who thinks SMS has no place in a private messaging app. Signal is the gold standard, and enabling sms merely legitimised this incredibly non private and antiquated messaging protocol.

          • BearOfaTime@lemm.ee
            71·
            10 months ago

            And gave a constant reminder to people that something better was right there.

            And put things in one place.

            You’re letting perfect be the enemy of good. At least with SMS support I could get people to switch to “this new texting app”, and we’d then have a proper Signal encrypted chat. And when they texted someone else, Signal would append the “you could have encryption too” signature, generating a conversation about it.

            The people who moved off of Signal went back to SMS entirely. How is that better?

    • toastal@lemmy.ml
      2·
      10 months ago

      I made the mistake of getting my family to switch to Signal. It works great for messaging, but it has other issues—beyond the typical SIM-required complaint. I hate that you have to register with a ‘primary’ device on either iOS or Android fueling that duopoly (SoL if you are on a postmarketOS or KaiOS or Capyloon phone… or just don’t want a internet-capable phone). Notifications are sent thru Google’s FSM (news 1–2 months ago that of course Apple & Google send all the metadata to the feds) & refuse to support UnifiedPush (thank goodness the Molly fork does). They’re also not too happy to support alternative clients meaning you are stuck with the shitty, resource-sucking Electron client while not having a web client or native or TUI client. And the worst cherry on top is shipping those iOS emoji to Android & Linux …eww.

      • /home/pineapplelover@lemm.ee
        1·
        10 months ago

        • Yeah not having it as a default SMS app sucks. Can’t really argue with you there. Perhaps, one could make a fork with it?? Just thought of that now.

        • I seriously doubt any encrypted messenger is going to support OS like KaiOS or non internet capable devices.

        • For unified push, just use molly.

        • iOS emojis…I really don’t care, Signal devs have other things to worry about.

        • toastal@lemmy.mlEnglish
          2·
          10 months ago

          With an FPGA or special CPU instruction set, the encryption algorithms could run on a toaster—which would give access to whatever low-spec handheld you wanted without making it chug to have strong encryption. That also still isn’t covering the future hope of a Linux phone, or someone that just wants to register an account on their laptop.

          Using forks puts stress on other teams to keep up with breaking changes, & 90%+ of folks won’t be looking for forks or be willing to trust their unofficial status. I saw the code for UnifiedPush as a Mattermost plugin & it was like 50 lines or something small which is much less than the rest while allowing users to keep control of their metadata which is a big deal if you care about privacy. A fork for SMS support would encounter similar issues, & now you either need to compete with Molly or copy its featureset otherwise users have to choose, SMS or UnifiedPush. That said, I agree with the SMS situation since it was easy to convince relatives to use this new “text app” where encryption magically came to a chunk of their contact list.

          Saying emoji was the most important was tongue-in-cheek, but it makes the application feel non-native (& I think Apple’s emoji are particularly ugly). You would think at least the Google set was shipped to Android, or—now hear me out—not ship emoji, don’t override the user experience, let the user’s fontconfig display the one they set. Shipping a whole font (or images) for emoji is why the application size is so bloated for a chat app.

          • /home/pineapplelover@lemm.ee
            1·
            10 months ago

            The first two arguments I get. But the emoji argument about not shipping them at all? Yeah if this is going to be a mainstream and easy to use app then that won’t fly. My friends, family, and I all use emojis, gifs, and stickers. I’m sure many people enjoy these things as well. All that bloat.

            • toastal@lemmy.mlEnglish
              2·
              10 months ago

              Are you using a device without an emoji font installed on the system at all? The web works just fine without browsers shipping an emoji font.

    • UnHidden@lemmy.worldOP
      14·
      10 months ago

      Working on it, hard to do well without JavaScript while maintaining the ease of webpage generation

  • Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlEnglish
    11·
    10 months ago

    This is worthy of a more usable interface than this spreadsheet widget.

    It took me a fair bit of scrolling to identify which attributes each of the six purple “N/A” values for SimpleX are, but now that I have I agree they’re accurate (though I think there is an argument to be made for just writing a green “no” for each of them).

    It is noteworthy that SimpleX is currently the only one of these (currently 34) messengers to not have a single red or yellow cell in its column. well done, @[email protected]! 😀

    edit: istm that SimpleX (along with several other things) getting a “no” in the “can hand IP address to the police” row is not really accurate. SimpleX does better than many things here in that they don’t have a lot of other info to give to the police along with the IP, but, if Bob has their phone seized (or remotely compromised) and then the police reading Alice and Bob’s messages from Bob’s phone want to know Alice’s IP address… they can compel a server operator to give it to them. (And it is the same for a user who posts a SimpleX contact link publicly.)

  • jbd@lemmy.ml
    10·
    10 months ago

    I noticed that some of these are apps and some are protocols. It makes sense to list the app if the protocol is proprietary, but it’s confusing that there can be multiple apps for an open protocol and not all of those apps could feature the same level of privacy.

  • BearOfaTime@lemm.ee
    112·
    10 months ago

    Nice work so far! It’s a big task, really.

    Smart idea hosting on git. Gives it a chance to be maintained and have a history.

    Any way to download as a csv/excel file? (I can just copy/paste from the web, but that’s imperfect)

    • UnHidden@lemmy.worldOP
      41·
      10 months ago

      I’m working on it, and an Excel file will be available later today under the “datasets” directory in GitHub

  • JustUseMint@lemmy.world
    101·
    10 months ago

    Would absolutely add Session, I think it’s basically a requirement for this comparison. Great work otherwise

  • Scolding7300@lemmy.world
    8·
    10 months ago

    This is awesome! Is there a way to freeze the first column? Just so you can scroll to the right and see the categories

  • lemmyreader@lemmy.ml
    6·
    10 months ago

    Looks good, thanks for the hard work!

    According to my uBlock Origin your site uses Google fonts which I have blocked. Can you make that more privacy friendly please ?