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On Mon, 21 Dec 2015, Martijn Grooten wrote:
On Mon, Dec 21, 2015 at 11:22:17AM +0000, Gordon Henderson wrote:Other secure messaging services are available. Signal for example. As recommended by that nice Mr. Snowden...Signal is nice and, more relevantly, has some of the cleverest people when it comes to secure messaging working on it. As for permissions, one of the problems with them is that they tend to be very broad. So to allow some WhatsApp users to take photos, the app needs to ask all users permission to use the camera. https://www.whatsapp.com/faq/en/android/28000004 In theory it would be possible to make the permissions both more finegrained and have the option to deny some of them and still install the app. In practice, that would probably quickly become a support hell.
Android 6 (marshmallow) has separate pre-app premissions features. Sadly 'network' is a default one that all app's get (so you get adverts on apps that would otherwise not need networking) The trick is to not launch a new app when you install it, but to then use setting to check the permissions before running it the first time. (At least I understand that's the best thing to do)
I actually dumped signal recently - mostly because it was waking me in the middle of the night with messages telling me so & so is now using signal and there was no way to turn it off other than to turn all notifications off - something that I do not want to do for other reasons - if my phone wakes me in the middle of the night then it's an emergency.
I was also a bit pissed off that it was telling me that so & so was now using signal... How does it know? Oh, it uploaded my contacts list somewhere, how silly of me... Now I'm sure that whatever it uploaded was securely hashed/encrypted, however I still didn't like it. I do not want to know who's using signal, nor do I give a toss.
So I've gone back to the bog-standard messenger. At last it seems free of "hangouts".
I don't use my phone to do secure/secret stuff anyway. Gordon -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq