4 ms·
If there is one thing I absolutely want to keep out of the big techs and governments surveillance data lakes its conversations with my mother. What will become
by totetsu 3y ago
If there is one thing I absolutely want to keep out of the big techs and governments surveillance data lakes its conversations with my mother. What will become of the world if we can’t even talk with our mothers without it being taken as a chance by some extrafamilial power to exert some behavioral modification.
- skybrian 3y agoI was very fortunate to have set up Mom with video chat just before the pandemic. Maybe try that?
- inetknght 3y agoVideo chat... in an age where algorithms exist to transpose faces and voices in real time. I admire the idea but I doubt it solves the problem: trusting that the communication is both private and authentic.
- skybrian 3y agoIt's commonly claimed to be end-to-end encrypted. Maybe you can find software you trust more than mainstream providers, though?
- lxgr 3y agoWhat does one have to do with the other? Algorithms to generate and imitate email text exist as well. If you want to be able to trust the content, you need to encrypt and authenticate that, no matter the channel. And many VoIP/video conferencing systems these days are end-to-end encrypted! It’s arguably easier than email, since communication is synchronous and there isn’t any expectation of being able to view past conversations, both of which are not true for email.
- jrflowers 3y agoThis is a good point. While faces and voices can be faked, text cannot
- mattnewton 3y agoI think maybe the point is rather than faces and voices can be indexed like text now too. For a brief time this was probably computationally infeasible and so it offered privacy, but now a government or company could theoretically automatically analyze all video chats. PGP+email still makes indexing this content computationally infeasible though.
- jrflowers 3y ago> PGP+email still makes indexing this content computationally infeasible though. This makes sense because the only thing you can encrypt is text and not video
- mattnewton 3y agoLet me know what platform you use for encrypted video calls that isn’t based on trusting a third party with the private keys. That is usually the requirement to get a UX people will use with their non technical family, but people accepted it, I think in part because it didn’t seem practical to index it all. It definitely is practical now though.
- sham1 3y agoNot the GP, but I'd at least imagine that a self-hosted XMPP could get the job done. You'd probably also need your own STUN and TURN servers, but it should definitely be doable. Hell, might even be doable with public XMPP and OMEMO, but I don't know if that works with the video call stuff. It's sadly a lot of effort, but I feel that for stuff like family privacy stuff, it might just be worth it.
- rekado 3y agoI self host prosody (an XMPP server) with a TURN server in my living room. With Guix System this is largely declarative, aside from the DNS records and initial user account registration (which I do on the command line). We're using it for messaging, sharing files, video calls across continents, etc. Re video calls: the XMPP and TURN servers are only used for negotiating the connection, so you don't need a very powerful machine for any of this. I have a little Rockpro64 for this purpose.