I have nothing against Signal. I just don’t have access to a phone number right now. I fully intend to use the Signal when I get a number. I know there is no silver bullet, no absolutes in the privacy world but I’m looking for any messengers that are generally considered to be private and secure on Android that I can try to convince my friends and family to use. I have a mid - low threat model, it’s just the thought of giving the Zuck anymore of my family’s data makes my skin crawl.
Matrix is great, Element has a really nice UI for it.
Signal also does work without a phone number, in fact it doesn’t really work for SMS anymore. Signal provides P2P for any communications with another Signal user. Matrix supports P2P as long as you set it up (encrypt a channel) and I think DM’s are P2PEdit: So Matrix is cool, End to End, NOT P2P, and probably the right decision for OP.
How do I use Signal without a phone number? Whenever I booted the app it needed a number.
a work around I use is text verified.com , costs like 2 bucks and then you can activate signal. Catch being that you can’t reuse the number to verify again, so its only a temporary solution but I have setup a bunch of accounts that way.
Yup, a Matrix client (especially Element) is a great choice.
No…matrix is not p2p
I apologize, I was thinking End-to-End. Though would someone mind enlightening me to the difference? Is is just multi-client support? Or that there can be a broker in between?
Also, to everyone currently roasting me, here is what I was referencing
peer to peer means that the information goes from one “peer” (device) to the other, no middleman
end to end encrypted means that the message is encrypted before transit and is then decrypted at the other “end” once it’s on the recipient’s device. end to end could have a server acting as a middleman, storing these encrypted messages, allowing for chat logs to be stored more conveniently and messages to be sent while one peer is offline.
this makes more sense if you understand public and private keys
when encrypting a message, there are two keys. the public key can only be used to encrypt and the private key to decrypt. a recipient will put its public key out and a peer wishing to send it a message will use this key to encrypt it. once the message arrives, the recipient can use their private key to then decrypt the message
Aaaah, got it, thank you so much for clearing that up for me. I apologize for my incorrect message then. From these comments, I’m inclined to say Matrix remains OP’s best option.
Thank you for educating me! 😊
End to end means the users at the ‘ends’ have the keys to open the message and ‘middle’ is the server it goes through (that doesn’t have the key so it can’t read the message).
Ah, and P2P would have no middle man doing the hand-off?
Yeah, basically you both need to be online at the same time for the other to receive message. Which, as you can imagine, can cause problems. Also I’m not sure you’d need encryption for P2P messaging? Maybe from the service provider?
A phone is a radio broadcast device. If you’re sending something unencrypted from it, anyone nearby can listen in to what it’s sending. Of course, it’s all compressed and sent with different protocols depending on what app you’re using, so it’s not trivial to read messages from everyone to everyone all the time, but if someone is determined it’s quite doable. SMS messages in particular are famous for having that happen to them, but it can happen with any unencrypted message.
Good point, thanks for the insight. I was thinking p2p in the old school terms where there wasn’t anything to intercept over the air (even though we were obviously talking about phones, dunno why my brain defaulted there).
For some reason, I thought it was interchangeable terminology, I’m glad to understand better now. I could see a lot of P2P’s forgoing encryption then, since presumably you’re not hopping over any other devices or networks.
Element/Matrix can be E2EE, it is most decidedly not P2P
did you mean E2EE? I don’t think signal is P2P. the signal server relays the messages in between users