The post office knows who I am, my address, and who sends mail to me. They even know who I send mail to, if I write my return sender details on the envelope. I am not anonymous.
But, if the person we use ciphers to encrypt our letters, and only the two of us can decrypt and read them, our communications can indeed be considered private.
There’s a fundamental difference.
Edit: to answer your crude (but funny) example, I have no expectation of anonymity when I walk into my toilet at home or the toilets at work. The very fact that I, as a man, walk into a stall rather than stand at the urinal, gives any of my colleagues washing their hands at the basin the reasonable confidence of knowing I am taking a shit.
The size of the shit, the faces I make, and the nature of the resulting product, however, are not know to anyone else except me. That’s the difference.
Okay, I get where you’re coming from. Signal is private enough for you, while I would feel more private if there is also no metadata about me.
For the toilet example, it’s more like that a foreign, unrelated person (like the Signal Foundation and by extension the government with a national security letter) knows about your shit-taking, not just family at home or colleagues who happen to be there. This would be a concern for me.
Yeah, I get it, but there’s just no way at all to ensure 100% total anonymity like you’re talking about, while also using a 3rd party carriage service of some sort (eg. mobile network; internet, etc).
We should go back to carrier pigeons with encrypted notes. That way, the sender and recipient “metadata” is only known to themselves (and the pigeons).
That’s why I’m using SimpleX Chat, there is no network-wide identity so no data can be collected. It’s a very clever architecture, actually exactly the carrier pidgeon scenario you describe, but in digital form. https://simplex.chat/#how-simplex-works
I’ve found my solution.
Not necessarily. You can use any server/pidgeon to send your message while your contact uses a different server to send. Also you can at any time change which servers you use and it is planned that the servers get rotated automatically in the future. There is no point in time where one pidgeon is responsible for multiple connections, you are using a bunch of pidgeons and swap them out all the time.
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Privacy and anonymity are different things.
The post office knows who I am, my address, and who sends mail to me. They even know who I send mail to, if I write my return sender details on the envelope. I am not anonymous.
But, if the person we use ciphers to encrypt our letters, and only the two of us can decrypt and read them, our communications can indeed be considered private.
There’s a fundamental difference.
Edit: to answer your crude (but funny) example, I have no expectation of anonymity when I walk into my toilet at home or the toilets at work. The very fact that I, as a man, walk into a stall rather than stand at the urinal, gives any of my colleagues washing their hands at the basin the reasonable confidence of knowing I am taking a shit.
The size of the shit, the faces I make, and the nature of the resulting product, however, are not know to anyone else except me. That’s the difference.
Okay, I get where you’re coming from. Signal is private enough for you, while I would feel more private if there is also no metadata about me.
For the toilet example, it’s more like that a foreign, unrelated person (like the Signal Foundation and by extension the government with a national security letter) knows about your shit-taking, not just family at home or colleagues who happen to be there. This would be a concern for me.
Yeah, I get it, but there’s just no way at all to ensure 100% total anonymity like you’re talking about, while also using a 3rd party carriage service of some sort (eg. mobile network; internet, etc).
We should go back to carrier pigeons with encrypted notes. That way, the sender and recipient “metadata” is only known to themselves (and the pigeons).
That’s why I’m using SimpleX Chat, there is no network-wide identity so no data can be collected. It’s a very clever architecture, actually exactly the carrier pidgeon scenario you describe, but in digital form. https://simplex.chat/#how-simplex-works I’ve found my solution.
Reading the SimpleX overview, it seems the only way the carrier pigeon analogy is truly satisfied with is with a private server, correct?
Not necessarily. You can use any server/pidgeon to send your message while your contact uses a different server to send. Also you can at any time change which servers you use and it is planned that the servers get rotated automatically in the future. There is no point in time where one pidgeon is responsible for multiple connections, you are using a bunch of pidgeons and swap them out all the time.