What are the privacy implications of adopting RCS?

When it first came out, I specifically remember that trying to turn it on in the messages app makes you agree to hand over all your messages to google, so I never used it. But now it just seems to support it anyways, so not sure what happened to the agreement I never clicked on.

same way on all platforms

too bad navigator.platform still returns Linux instead of Windows…

When you say “app” do you mean something that will let you view remotely through a residential NAT connection with no port forwarding or hole punching? Because 99.9% of those options are inherently not private.

If you only need the camera itself to have a local feed i.e. you already have some kind of VPN/tunnel/etc. into your home network, then something like a cheap Amcrest works fine and does not require Internet access for the camera itself.

No, there is no way to prevent sites from uploading the info besides just not providing it in the first place.

And because of how programming languages work, there’s no way for the browser to identify that data being uploaded “is” anything specific, especially when there’s things like encryption, obfuscation or just re-arranging the data itself into larger collections of data.

what privacy lol, it’s already gone

legit I’ve had people get angry at me for using “they” the same way everyone normally does

It is not possible to have privacy online anymore. Full stop.

Absolutely not. I left those communities because of what was in them, I will not be seeking them out on purpose just to show a bunch of CSAM to people and probably incriminate myself.

have never had issues

Sample size of 1 doesn’t really mean anything, sorry.

I’ve never been in a car crash, I guess that means it’s not a pervasive issue.

See the problem with this logic?

I have nothing to hide

Ok, pull down your pants and hand me your unlocked phone.

Did you even watch the video??

Freedom of speech is the right to express opinions without government restraint, not without corporate restraint.

It IS all over the place. Did you not watch the video?

I think that’s a problem of who is recommending the servers to people

I don’t think that is true at all, for several reasons:

• matrix.org actually has tons of terrible users itself, and many channels even ban or strongly discourage even having users from that server, plus it’s usually the slowest.

• a great many channels on matrix.org are unmoderated and already host CSAM and abusive/illegal content

• because of how federation works, anyone who is on matrix.org and happens to join a “bad” channel even on another server, now forces matrix.org to always keep a copy of that channel and all of its content forever.

Facebook

Including Cloudflare, who for some reason banned kiwifarms yet continues to allow sites like 8chan and others who are also hosting CSAM/zoosadist/other vile content.

the only way for an average user to get exposed to such rooms

But there is a growing dissent for matrix.org itself as a homeserver for various reasons, and many people/blogs/posts/etc. online will try to steer users towards alternative “privacy-respecting” or “free-speech/anti-censorship” (aka allowing illegal content) servers, many of which of course host terrible content, so I think more and more people are getting exposed to it and realizing how bad of a problem it is.

Is this impossible due to Matrix’s design, or is it poor moderation from server admins?

Kinda both. The design does not inherently destroy rooms permanently afaik, and server moderators don’t do enough to prune bad things either way. It’s a never-ending game of whack-a-mole. People have also been (ab)using its file upload capabilities to use matrix as a global, free, unlimited CDN, sometimes even for completely (to normal users) hidden content using custom message types hiding in plain sight.

People need to get this through their heads, XMPP is the only solution for their problems.

Strongly disagree and this sounds like dangerous FUD to me. For one, there’s comparatively zero users across XMPP anyways, and it has a big problem with compatibility across different software packages. It also does nothing to help the problems stated in the video of massive droves of abusive content and server operators unknowingly hosting copies of it across the world. Then there’s the privacy and GDPR minefields that come with any decentralized/federated service.

Besides the seeming “government automatically = bad” stance, I found it quite informative and I think sheds a big light on some serious problems with it (and all) federated services (not to mention the privacy/GDPR minefield that federation is) that a lot more people need to know about.

The problem is the evidence requires linking to channels hosting CSAM, so nobody is going to provide that for you.

never encountered a single instance of abuse

I encounter it literally every single day and I know many others that do too. It’s so bad it makes me want to quit using Matrix altogether. You’re just not in the right (wrong) rooms. The ones that happen to get left unmoderated are always taken over by bad actors, not even talking about the ones (like mentioned in the video) that were deliberately setup to harbor vile content, which is also plentiful unfortunately.