When we’re communicating with people in a group, we occasionally want to write someone from the group a private message. It’s just a one-time thing, however, it doesn’t matter, it’s not sensitive per se. And from time to time we write something to someone. Maybe we like a communication app, we have fun in public groups, for example. The following are arguments for thinking about the security of communications, even when we may not be communicating about sensitive matters. Why should we deal specifically with privacy? Isn’t it mainly important how the communication tool is used, whether the users are happy with it and whether I can find all the people I need there? I will not go into the risks of all platforms in detail, I will only describe the platforms that are acceptable for privacy from my perspective.

In this text, we will look at the properties with respect to communication privacy – how secure is the data and the metadata of the communication. From solutions for corporations (Slack, Google Suite, Microsoft Teams), through (originally gaming) communities (Discord), to personal communication – WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Telegram, Viber, Wire, Signal, Threema, …Įach of these projects has slightly different uses and different characteristics. It’s the basis of a so-called surveillance capitalism.Ī special category of communication, which has recently been affected very fundamentally by the introduction of encrypted communication, are messaging applications. But this positive change goes hand in hand with an increased surveillance different way of tracking, informing third parties about what we are doing, what social media posts we like and so on. If we go to an unencrypted site, the browser will warn us that something is wrong.

Virtually all websites have switched to encrypted communication using the https protocol. Recently, there have been some fairly major improvements in the encryption of our communications.

Encrypted messengers