Yeah thats all correct. Its an unencryted message system so just assume everything over the channel is being mined or stored for later.
this post was submitted on 03 May 2023
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Privacy
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SMS & email are antiquated services, this is why Protonmail is rad as they're making a program which was never designed for encryption, encrypted. But the thing is even encrypted data is being stored in hopes of being decrypted by quantum computers in the near future...
Unfortunately many services block protonmail by default, or mark it as junk. Hopefully this will change.
Probably plays into their purchase of SimpleLogin, seems to never be an issue if you setup your own domain name with them.
when you send an SMS, all of the metadata imaginable is retained by default... as is the content of the message, in many cases.
besides law enforcement and other government agencies, numerous telco employees also have access to this data, and, in many countries at least, some of it is also sold to data brokers.
you can't get much less private than SMS.
SMS is itself metadata, they use the spare bits in the voice data steam.
That is a weird message, I think it is technically correct but since SMS is wholly unencrypted everything is available. Not only that but often the entire messages are retained for an extended period of time (many carriers let view your SMS log with full messages). So saying "the length of the message" is a bit misleading because the whole message is likely retained.
And do phone calls have the same meta data?
Phone calls are also completely unencrypted from the point of view of carriers on either side of the call. However AFAIK they are frequently not recorded by carriers, likely due to the higher cost of storing audio. Of course I can't say anything about other agencies that may be intercepting the call with or without carrier cooperation.
TL;DR If you care about privacy avoid the telephone system, just use it as an untrusted data pipe and send all data over it encrypted.
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