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this post was submitted on 20 Feb 2024
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Sign-up still requires a phone number.. -.-"
Checkout Matrix/Element ~~or Session~~,
there you can actually enjoy privacy by signing-up without a phone number/email:
Edit: Due to Session's company residing in Australia,
which appareantly has bad privacy laws,
i don't feel comfortable with recommending it anymore
Is Session actually secure though? I know they're based in Australia, and as an Aussie myself, holy fuck would I not trust this country for even a fraction of a picosecond with anything private or sensitive. We have some of the world's most draconian and far-reaching digital privacy and surveillance laws, and I'm not ready to accept that Session hasn't been secretly compromised by the AFP, given the law against revealing government backdoors.
Happy to be proven wrong, but I always err on the side of extreme caution when it comes to Australia. Digitally, we're closer to the CCP than any of our fellow western nations.
Wasn't aware of that, would love to hear about it if someome could shine some more light onto the matter :)
If that's the case, I have to stop using/recommending Session
I'm not the person you responded to, but the Assistance and Access Act 2018 is probably a good place to start. Here is a page from the Aus Government about it, but the very short version is that the government can ask tech providers to assist them with building capabilities into their systems to allow the government to access data to help with the investigation of certain crimes. In some cases these will be voluntary requests, in other cases they will be requests that must be fulfilled, including asking providers to add capabilities that the government has developed.
There's a lot more detail about it, and the government insists that they won't ask providers to create systematic weaknesses or to decrypt communications entirely, but it's not clear to me exactly how those ideas are actually implemented. Unfortunately, much of the process (likely the entire process) is not made public, so as far as I'm aware there aren't any good examples of requests that the government has made and what sorts of things have or haven't been implemented.