A good friend sent this link to me today: https://nordvpn.com/blog/most-secure-messaging-app. It’s a good article, you should read it. This however, prompted the thoughts below.

Good Morning! Thank you for sharing this!

It’s true that signal is the most secure messaging app. I use both telegram and signal. They both have pros and cons like all apps.

Since WhatsApp change of T&C there have been many articles that speak about the privacy of messaging apps. And it’s great because the discussion brings awareness to this aspect of communication. However I think it’s also the wrong (first) question to ask because it is reductionist and puts the focus on the wrong thing. Let me explain!

The social web brought about shifts of a magnitude last seen with the invention of the printing press. The economy of the social web is supported by a model (targeted advertising) that is BY DESIGN hostile to our well being, social balance and democratic values. When I say by design it means that the model itself contains in its essence imperatives that are fundamentally hostile to the above. It distorts debates, polarises society, addicts individuals. It can’t work if it doesn’t do that. Those effects are intrinsic to the model.

So what we are witnessing at the moment is nothing less than an ecological crisis. We have a digital social economy based on a model which “side effects” are wrecking havoc in our lives and our societies (whether they are really “side” effects or just effects is another debate for another time).

In 1964 Rachel Carson write a seminal book called Silent Spring, a desperate call for the world to wake up to the large scale slaughtering of our natural environment. Today we are faced with a similar crisis, an ecological crisis of our inner environments.

So to go back to the question about the privacy of messaging apps. I said earlier it’s a good question of course but the wrong question to start with. Apps are not created equal. They are not stand-alone isolated entities. They exist in a larger system. Apps like Telegram and Signal (and a bunch of less popular messaging apps) are not owned by large monopolies which profits rest on targeted advertising. They may or may not be the most secure, but even if they are not, the systemic effect of using them will be very different than those of using an app like WhatsApp or FB messenger which belong to a monopolistic entity that has shown many times it was ready to lie and manipulate with total disregard for the effects of their services on the planet.

So the first question to ask is: by using this technology, whose interests am I serving? To go back to the parallel with environmental ecology, asking whether an app is private is the equivalent of asking whether a good is too expensive without looking at the ecosystem that produces it. Maybe a good is expensive but it is of quality and produced in an ecosystem that favours small producers and benefits the real economy.

To be honest most of us do NOT need messaging apps that absolutely protect our communications. None of what I have ever written to you or on our group chats for example warrants a level of secrecy required to keep state secrets, or to keep investigative journalists in authoritarian countries safe (or these type of things).

And then, what do we mean by “private”? We have been habituated to think about privacy as hiding the content we share from the snooping eyes of government or police etc. This is surely one important aspect of privacy but in the digital age by far not the only one.

To understand why, we need to understand a fundamental difference that the FB and Googles of the world are very careful not to emphasise. It’s the difference between content and meta content. Content (or data) is what we share, the messages, the photos, the emojis etc… meta content is meta data, which is the collateral information that accompanies communication. Targeted advertising companies are meta data hungry not content hungry (see the post below “Why I Am Quitting WhatsApp Part II“).

Meta data is really the gold of the social internet because when aggregated and analysed by the large systems of big data they reveal things about us that we would not dream to share as content. And by the way, those insights are much more valuable than raw data and can be shared with government, police etc.

This is why we need to become conscious digital consumers. Just as we try not to consume plastic straws or make efforts to buy sustainable coffee, we need to make efforts and care for what type of digital technology we consume. Remember that behind the app, there is a whole ecosystem.

I know people who decide to lead a sustainable lifestyle, only buy organic food and walk to their work but who consume technology with the gluttony of a pig and the lack of awareness of a 2 years old (no disrespect to pigs and 2 years old here, this is what they are supposed to do! 😉). This is just not coherent!