Truly private communications - 5 trusted apps and some not so trusted

Nothing to hide

Our messages exchanged via email, messaging or phone are rarely safe from prying eyes and ears. Even if the content of messages is not routinely monitored, the data about who you send them to and from can and in fact is. The content of your messages is not as important as what they do: map you.

If you're working on research projects or projects with business implications, keeping your exchanges confidential goes without saying, even more so if you're in a foreign country, even if you have nothing to hide.

At each stage of a message's transmission, all sorts of meta-data are produced: sender, recipient, IP address, MAC address, time, message type, encoding, software type, version, etc. Enough data to identify anyone by cross-referencing.

Also, if the recipient is not able to receive your message, it is stored somewhere waiting to be transmitted. How long will it be stored? Hours, days, months, years? Some governments keep all transmissions ...

Your message goes through dozens of nodes and finally through the final internet access server which can also keep it, copy it, consult it. To escape this possibility, encryption comes to the rescue. The decoding effort required to decode an encrypted message among thousands of others is rarely justified. So exchanges can remain private... if they are encrypted.

A simple curtain to start

Not everyone needs to know everything about your opinions, concerns, interests. Also, many organizations offer communication services with guarantees of our privacy. Most of them are free for private users, they are mostly financed by commercial billable services. Security has a price.

In the list below, we have classified the applications by trust level. The difference between Level 5 and Level 4 is not major and is mainly due to the reputation of their owner or the laws in the countries where they are based.

For companies like Rakuten or Facebook that rely primarily on marketing or like Amazon that demonstrates a light concern for data privacy, to say the least, there is room for doubt about whether their users' data is respected.

For the following categories, enough security issues have been documented to raise serious doubts about the integrity of their services. Whether it's disabled or very optional encryption options, some unencrypted data, or security flaws around the servers, these services are not known to be very reliable in terms of privacy. Finally, those that remain discreet about their actual owners, raise doubts about their motives.

In short, in a country that requires access to communications, a company cannot claim to guarantee the security of communications that pass through its system if it resides there. Besides, the first applications on our list are banned from countries like China or Russia for refusing to give such access. A kind of positive recognition finally!

We put curtains on our windows, we can do the equivalent for our conversations.

Thot directory of services for encryption of communications

Illustration: SergeyIT - Deposit Photos