I Love Computers and Technology

Was looking for the right place to post this... here is good. A lot of people are asking if I use Kik, or saying they use Kik. So I've lived into it a bit.. and if you think in terms of privacy (important when talking with strangers on the internet), you may want to try alternatives. So I've done a bit of digging and, after putting aside the really insecure stuff (fb messenger, Skype, kik, snapchat) and pretty secure stuff (whisper, secret, telegram) I've settled on Threema. It's cheap, great reviews, minimal data stored (can skip giving them phone numbers and whatever), and it's not US based so no men in suits showing up and demanding all their user data. Not open source (sad) but externally reviewed so.. good enough for now. Tried it out last week, very quick setup and easy to use. If you prefer something else let me know what it is and why?

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persistentone22 · M

You raise a really fantastic new point here, which is that Android and iPhone applications often want access to your phone and contact list. Few people realize that Facebook uses this to grab all of those phone numbers and cross reference them against its registered users. If it finds a match, it then suggests you to each other as "friends". This is such a monstrous violation of privacy for everyone. So you are smart - and right - to look carefully at what permissions a chat application asks for when it installs. Unfortunately, I use these applications on my desktop more than my phone, and Windows 8/10 do not have good privacy tools to help determine how nosy any application you install actually is. Ultimately I just look at the overall design regarding security, and at some point I make a decision to trust the vendor or not. My conversations are so benign I don't feel I need to go crazy on my vendor review.