Which App is the best for Data Privacy?

Posted by Rose Molly on December 31st, 2018

People are much more aware and interested in secure, encrypted messaging applications. You have a few different choices, but, what app offers it all is most important. To that end, here in this article, we will discuss some of the popular options available.

Secure encrypted messaging applications have grown with immense popularity as people have realized the importance of data privacy and how data companies are collecting information about us every single day. Unlike conventional phone calls, it becomes quite easy for a  corporate-giant or government officials to gain access to your chat transcripts to be used for nefarious means. While different messaging applications are out there, some take the lead in both features, platform availability, and popularity. Apart from text messaging, the best-encrypted applications also include audio and video calling. Let’s have a look at some of the encrypted messaging apps available.

Signal: While messaging apps like WhatsApp has been a popular choice, you must have heard about Signal-often in the news when we talk of data encryption. Be it an article about data security, right from Snowden to Russia, it will have a mention of Signal. That’s because Signal supports end-to-end encryption, meaning if any third-party intercepts your messages, they would see a jumbled and gibberish message and not the actual conversation. Also, Signal is peer-reviewed, open-source, and routinely audited, that means it is always up to date considering the security point of view.

WhatsApp: though WhatsApp has more than 1 billion users-obviously a crazy number, what’s more, crazy is that the platform partnered with Signal, for integrating their end-to-end encrypted messaging protocol. Not like Signal, which is considered more of a security app, WhatsAppfirstcalls itself a messaging application, meaning that it will endorse all sorts of puerile stuff like GIFs and stickers. While the Signal is open-source, WhatsApp isn’t, so we basically don’t know about anything happening behind the scenes.

Telegram: Telegram is hyped to be a safe application, but in reality, things are quite different. The platform only offers encryption when the user switches on the “Secret” mode, meaning all the messages on Telegram are shared over unencrypted servers by default. Yes, there are different features like disappearing messages, letting you put a timer on your messages. Once the timer expires, the message gets destructed automatically. Also, Telegram holds a clean user interface, but all these features can’t make us oversee the data privacy issue.

One needs to be careful about turning on the Secret mode “ALWAYS” for ensuring data privacy, making Telegram the worst and most complicated option amongst all. Why can’t it roll out default encryption like Signal? Even Telegram’s Secret model has not been much praised. So if you up for data privacy, encrypted messaging application, then keeping Telegram out from the league is a better option.

Concluding this, Signal is one of the most secured, private application, standing out among other options available. The platform ensures secured encryption and better privacy as it comes from a non-commercial background. Telegram disappoints us with the non-default encrypting policy.

source: http://dataprivacycoalition.org/which-app-is-the-best-for-data-privacy/