Vcontact exists for exactly this reason.
Comment on Russian lawmakers say 'security threat' WhatsApp should prepare to leave Russia
troglodyke@lemmy.federate.cc 4 days ago
Whilst WhatsApp is still owned by meta and I’m sure the US military would have a lot use for the metadata they collect, let’s be honest, I’m sure Putin would prefer if Russians switched to a platform they can spy on themselves
muusemuuse@sh.itjust.works 3 days ago
rottingleaf@lemmy.world 4 days ago
I’ve read that MAX (typical horse taste of modern Russian official names, similar to Rosgvardia, Gosuslugi, Rostech and so on ; Soviet-time many-many-many caps abbreviations are boring, but somehow better) in its current early versions is a piece of spyware looking like Telegram, literally saving passwords and banking data and browsing history. Well, I’m almost certain Telegram itself is not much better.
Installed Briar on my phone and persuaded my sister, and to my grandma’s today.
muusemuuse@sh.itjust.works 3 days ago
I like the idea of these meshes but until Linux phones become a practical option it doesn’t matter. Apple will restrict the hardware, Google will let Gemini spy on anything that passes through the phone, the phone situation is a mess.
I don’t really blame governments for that either. I blame fucking business majors.
rottingleaf@lemmy.world 3 days ago
They actually don’t yet have mesh routing, it’s more like an automated sneakernet over BT and shared Wi-Fi right now, until you have access to global Internet. Like ships at high seas exchanging mail and news.
Briar has an alpha stage client for Linux phones among other things, unfortunately I use FreeBSD right now and don’t want to reboot to try it, and without rebooting there are some problems under Linux JRE under Linux emulation, and under native JRE it swears at unknown OS.
Ulrich@feddit.org 4 days ago
Yes that’s why China bans most private messengers.