Why does this community, which is privacy oriented, use Discord rather than Matrix? - eviltoast

On the side bar it lists the following:

  • [Matrix/Element]Dead
  • Discord

“Discord” is an active link, but the Matrix link is completely inactive. Not only is it inactive (which could have be excused as a broken link), but it is also manually labeled as “Dead”, as if there is no intention of making it work. How can a community that is focused on privacy willingly favor a service that is privacy non-respecting when a perfectly functional privacy-respecting alternative exists?

  • Ferk@lemmy.ml
    6·
    1 year ago

    like how not being able to sign up for something with tor and monero is a privacy violation, it’s not.

    Note that “secrecy” and “privacy” are often understood in Security lingo as different things. One protects confidentiality, the other one protects anonymity.

    It’s possible to have one and not the other…

    You can have a very private system through onion routing but have the contents of the messages exchanged be in plaintext, open to the public. Nobody will be able to know the one who wrote the message was you. But they can see the message. (then there is privacy, but not secrecy).

    Or you can have very strongly encrypted communications (say HTTPS) but have the DNS exchanges (or the TLS handshake, or the IP addresses) be in the clear, so people in the middle (eg. your ISP… or your workplace tech guys) can know exactly that the packages are sent by you and where you sent them, even if their content is encrypted. They can know which service you tried to access to, for how long and how many times (so you have secrecy, but not privacy).