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.
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?
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.
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).