Every year recently, we have conducted monthly reviews on messaging service providers. Some we have covered a number of times to talk about their development or degradation in the privacy of their service.
A lot has changed over the years, BBM has gone, in fact, Blackberries are no longer in production in any form. However, most of what we have seen, and are seeing, is the encroachment of "law & order", in numerous disguises and with numerous justifications.
Incredibly, we have even seen mobile phone developers facilitating spying on their own customers! A truly private messenger is needed more than ever. We are always on the lookout (if you see something of interest let us know) so during the course of last year we expanded to look at some startup decentralized providers, not well known, new to market...the results were patchy but the reviews are below:
As a guide, here is an 'unofficial' list of the apparent capabilities of FBI reach with certain common providers:
Additionally, here is a quick review chart for the privacy capabilities (or limitations) of some common providers...forewarned is forearmed:
We will continue to track the established services, whilst we search out new ones, so next month we'll take another look at Signal which has come on a lot in the recent past...but more about that in February (3rd Wednesday - every month for all reviews).
Let's aim to keep our metadata to ourselves and our messages private in 2022!
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Privacy Advocate
