Privacy in messaging apps
The notion of privacy
The Private / Public distinction was characterised by the difference of Home / Outside Home, according to Aristotle.
In liberal theory (Locke and Mill) the distinctions were Realm of Self-regulation / Realm of government authority or Worldās bounty / Private possessions.
Warren and Brandeis in 1890 in the US, responded to the rise of photography of celebrated individuals and articulated the right to privacy, the right to oneās personality, the right to control information about oneself, and more broadly the right to be left alone.
Privacy and surveillance are related concepts. The possibility of being watched creates a surveillance society or transparency society described by Foucault and Byung-Chul Han.
Data privacy is the right to control how data about oneself is used and accessed.
Why your data privacy matters
As AI and computation improves, the argument that āIām not anybody significantā stops making sense. Language technologies are so good that it can be worthwhile to predict and control even less minor characters and for smaller purposes. After all, this can all be done automatically and to a very high degree of effectiveness.
Please try to figure out how you can keep your data on your own servers, or encrypted on other peopleās servers, whereever possible.
What could go wrong?
- There could be a data breach and all your chats could just be uploaded onto the internet for anyone to see, and anyone to search with ChatGPT. Imagine the prompt to an AI agent āfind me anything embarrassing that XYZ has ever said from these leaked chat messagesā.
- Your data could be being used right now to subliminally target you with political and consumer messaging.
- Your data could be sold to an adversarial organisation or state who could use it against you, to weaken your state, especially as you rise in your career and become a person of significance.
Differences between some messaging apps
Telegram: By default, has your chat data.
By default, Telegramās team have the ability to read all your messages. This also means that if they are hacked or compromised in any other way, your messages could end up in various places like training data for AI, surveillance operations, on the public internet, etc.
Whatsapp: Likely tries to collect and use your metadata.
Messages are end-to-end encrypted so Meta cannot read them. Meta does probably try to record and use your metadata - i.e. information like who you are texting and at what times. Whatsapp also tries to log whatever it can about you like your location data. Meta has a history of ruthlessly trying to get more data about you and use it to make money.
Signal: Actively tries to design solutions to avoid collecting or storing data and metadata.
Signal is end-to-end encrypted, and offers you either an encrypted backup or no backup at all.
Signal has the ability to access your metadata in the same way as Whatsapp but it chooses not to store it. Signal is a privacy-first company, they are always trying new ways to improve the privacy of the product.
More details on Signal vs Whatsapp, including a long list of small differences that show Signalās ethos and other slight advantages over Whatsapp.
How to migrate?
- Discuss this issue with your friends who you text the most and you might be able to convince them to move with you
- If you are initiating a text conversation, use a secure messaging app
- Change your profile picture or status on insecure messaging apps to indicate you do not prefer to be contacted there.
- Insist on using all the security settings in insecure messaging apps (e.g. turn on secret chats on Telegram)
- If you are doing something that is a gift to people (e.g. organising a party), create the chat group for it on a secure messaging app
- Turn off your notifications on insecure apps. People will learn that you are more reachable on secure apps.
- Create stickers for secure messaging apps
It is so weird to me now to think that a computer science degree teaches all these skills on how to store, process and manipulate peopleās information but does not go deep into the potential risks and misuse of such technologies in the violation of peopleās privacy.