I guess the stuff I was worried about was contact list sharing, Google Advertising ID, installed app list, and who knows what else a native app can access. Good to know that Graphene has that protection, I guess I’ll worry less about using WA.

This is a good little story, I enjoyed reading it :)

Yes, having message history and a good desktop client are great benefits of a bridge.

Look up “Beeper”. It’s not about privacy, rather about convenience. They run bridges for you. Nothing went through the main app, but I had to authorize Beeper through WA as a separate session. It would die in 2 weeks with WA disabled, like I said, but I guess if I kept WA enabled this wouldn’t have happened.

I’ve seen WA mods (basically rebuilt .apk files), but I don’t know much about them, and therefore they seem shady.

This summer? I disabled the WA app on my phone, though, so there was no background activity.

My matrix app (an Element fork) had several bridges and multiple chats, I feel like they were all synching in the background. I haven’t noticed that when I was at home, but when I was camping, battery going from 100% in the evening down to 70% in the morning was a problem.

I used a setup like that, but there were 2 things that I didn’t like

• I had to keep Whatsapp on my phone and open it every 2 weeks, because without it the bridge would just die (so why not just use it anyway?).
• The app I had used a lot off battery, which was a dealbreaker for bike/backpacking trips.

Unlike some of you here, I actually do.

I was not asking for advice.

What I find really annoying about this community, is that no matter what you do, for some people it just won’t be good enough, and they will throw it in your face.

“You click on a reddit link but their certificate expired and the page isn’t opening”

For SMS/MMS, I find Right Messages to be quite good. For RCS, I don’t think there are any alternatives. And surely you know about the variety of messengers (Matrix, Signal, …).

!monero@monero.town

I keep businesses in my area up-to-date, doesn’t take much time at all.

It says “page not found”, maybe because I’m not in EU.

I have Mullvad running all the time, and I’ve had this issue with one unpopular app and one online store website.

What’s really bad is the number of captchas 🤖

Interestingly, I use Instagram with Mullvad for over a year now, both app and web. Reddit seems to be working fine too. Maybe that’s because I opened accounts without a VPN.

Until you’re doing an online course in a simplistic web editor. Don’t ask me how I know 🥲

What issues does 6 have? My experience has been great, but I have nothing to compare it to.

• push notifications
• websites that tell you “use our app”
• better UX

If “rooted” is a requirement, then this won’t work.

I feel like the difference is not that big, though.

If you rent, your landlord has a right to enter your apartment, even though they rarely use that right. Sometimes, they can check on things. The same applies to apartments in personal ownership: if police has a warrant, they can enter and see if there’s illegal activity. So based on this analogy, no, apartments are not “encrypted” chat rooms, and I don’t think any significant number of places would be considered “encrypted” or “fully private”, if you must.

Continuing with the analogy, Telegram can view and intervene in the activity on the platform, just like landlords or police, but Durov, let’s call him a landlord, protects privacy of his tenants, not letting the law enforcement in.

Speaking of E2EE platforms, I’m sure there’s crime happening on them, because it’s logical for criminals to use more secure protocols, yet I don’t see the same arguments made about them. It’s just they are providing the same (better!) tools to the criminals without an option for law enforcement to see the content (but perhaps with options to ban on request).

And frankly I don’t think there’s too big of a difference between E2EE and non-E2EE platforms in terms of conscience: the former just deliberately deprive themselves of an opportunity to see what content goes through their services.

P.S. that said, I don’t think it’s ok that Telegram promotes the service as private, and that Durov ignored requests to nuke known illegal activity.