Unencrypted chat history is a prime target for police

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/1874605

A 17-year-old from Nebraska and her mother are facing criminal charges including performing an illegal abortion and concealing a dead body after police obtained the pair’s private chat history from Facebook, court documents published by Motherboard show.

  • b3nsn0w@pricefield.orgEnglish
    8·
    1 year ago

    yeah, the difference is pretty stark:

    • lemmy: we’ll give you a way to dm anyone on site, but please don’t use that, if you set up an app on this other open source service we’re not affiliated with (which is basically an encrypted discord) we’ll do our best to make it as seamless for you as possible. we’ll keep warning you for your own privacy.
    • meta/facebook: aggressively keeps you on-platform for spying purposes; literally killed xmpp a decade ago and they’ll fuckin do it again (if we let them)

    They trust me. Dumb fucks.

    - Mark Zuckerberg

    (yes it sounds like satire but that’s a real quote)

    • nLuLukna @sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      3·
      1 year ago

      The Lemmy DM is imo actually quite important. If I want to get in touch with someone about a post, nothing more. It is an easy option, and serves a purpose. It isn’t imo meant to be used for anything else.

      • b3nsn0w@pricefield.orgEnglish
        2·
        1 year ago

        yep, it’s important that we have this capability, but it’s also nice that unlike other platforms that do their best to lock you in, lemmy actively pushes you toward a safer alternative

          • b3nsn0w@pricefield.orgEnglish
            3·
            1 year ago

            Matrix, which is pretty much an encrypted and open-source Discord clone (at least in the same fashion as Lemmy would be a Reddit clone). I personally use Element to interact with it and have a matrix.org account, but Matrix is just like the fediverse, you can choose any instance or client you want, or even host an instance yourself. In your Lemmy settings you can set up your Matrix user, right below your email address as of 0.18.1, and if you do, a new buttons saying “send secure message” will show up on your profile, next to “send message”, which will redirect people trying to message you to Matrix.

    • bluejay@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      3·
      1 year ago

      Was it Facebook that killed xmpp or Google? Legitimately asking because I’ve always seen that blamed on Google.

      • triarius@programming.devEnglish
        2·
        1 year ago

        It was Google, they Embraced, Extended, and Extinguished it with Google Chat. Then they killed that themselves.

        • triplenadir@lemmygrad.mlEnglish
          2·
          1 year ago

          correction: it was both! fedbook chat also supported xmpp at first, they never federated but you could at least use it with a jabber client. then when they had enough market share they killed it.

          fun semi related fact is that whatsapp, at least a couple of years ago, was using modified ejabberd (ie an xmpp server) as the backend - so arguably they helped with EEE too.