Privacy Guides
In the digital age, protecting your personal information might seem like an impossible task. We’re here to help.
This is a community for sharing news about privacy, posting information about cool privacy tools and services, and getting advice about your privacy journey.
You can subscribe to this community from any Kbin or Lemmy instance:
Check out our website at privacyguides.org before asking your questions here. We've tried answering the common questions and recommendations there!
Want to get involved? The website is open-source on GitHub, and your help would be appreciated!
This community is the "official" Privacy Guides community on Lemmy, which can be verified here. Other "Privacy Guides" communities on other Lemmy servers are not moderated by this team or associated with the website.
Moderation Rules:
- We prefer posting about open-source software whenever possible.
- This is not the place for self-promotion if you are not listed on privacyguides.org. If you want to be listed, make a suggestion on our forum first.
- No soliciting engagement: Don't ask for upvotes, follows, etc.
- Surveys, Fundraising, and Petitions must be pre-approved by the mod team.
- Be civil, no violence, hate speech. Assume people here are posting in good faith.
- Don't repost topics which have already been covered here.
- News posts must be related to privacy and security, and your post title must match the article headline exactly. Do not editorialize titles, you can post your opinions in the post body or a comment.
- Memes/images/video posts that could be summarized as text explanations should not be posted. Infographics and conference talks from reputable sources are acceptable.
- No help vampires: This is not a tech support subreddit, don't abuse our community's willingness to help. Questions related to privacy, security or privacy/security related software and their configurations are acceptable.
- No misinformation: Extraordinary claims must be matched with evidence.
- Do not post about VPNs or cryptocurrencies which are not listed on privacyguides.org. See Rule 2 for info on adding new recommendations to the website.
- General guides or software lists are not permitted. Original sources and research about specific topics are allowed as long as they are high quality and factual. We are not providing a platform for poorly-vetted, out-of-date or conflicting recommendations.
Additional Resources:
- EFF: Surveillance Self-Defense
- Consumer Reports Security Planner
- Jonah Aragon (YouTube)
- r/Privacy
- Big Ass Data Broker Opt-Out List
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It does matter, because it would be a lot harder to get my information. It's called reducing your attack surface. Same reason I use an encrypted Swiss email provider.
What are you talking about? Metadata is information about your messages besides it's encrypted content; i.e. time of send and who the recipient and sender are. Matrix has a large weakness, as most users use matrix.org. This is bad because metadata can reveal a lot about ones communications, and most every message sent on matrix (unless it is in a private message with someone not using matrix.org) is passed through matrix.org. This pools a lot of metadata in one place, and there are other messengers do not have this issue, or if they do, they do not have it as badly. Metadata is not magically hidden because your server is located in Switzerland.
I'm very aware of what metadata is. I'm not sure what's confusing you.
If my data is not on matrix.org, no one can get my data from Matrix.org.
If my data is on a Swiss server, the government can't get it, even if they have a warrant.
If I have some data on matrix.org and some data on a Swiss server, they can only get my data on matrix.org.
This is called reducing your attack surface.
Yes, but Matrix leaks way more metadata to other servers, negating more of the benefit of using a Swiss server compared to if you used XMPP for example.
FUD, Matrix doesn't leak any more data than XMPP in that regard. Admins of either service can know what rooms you're in and information about events such as time they were sent.
XMPP isn't any better in this regard.
Not FUD, Matrix syncs entire chats to all involved servers, unlike XMPP. This post explains and links to why Matrix does leak more data than XMPP in this regard.
Also, using the term FUD makes you seem stupid.