Is using an Matrix account from matrix.org private and secure enough to talk with my family members and people in general?

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Sounds good, thanks for the info

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If it's low privacy needs (ie you don't have a state threat model), Signal is completely fine. I use it to talk to my friends. I also use Matrix, though federated Matrix isn't the best for privacy either due to the amount of metadata that leaks through federation. But federated Matrix is also fine for the kinds of things you would use eg Discord or IRC for.

If you do have a state threat model, I personally think SimpleX is ideal for that, but it doesn't have as much of a userbase so you probably need people who care enough (eg people actively under threat) to switch to a new platform. Whereas most people I know are already on either Signal or Matrix, and I'm not having particularly sensitive conversations with them either so both work fine.

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That isn't what that document says. It says that they can impersonate you in non-E2EE scenarios. The clients I use warn me when a message isn't properly encrypted so someone without E2EE keys can't impersonate someone in an E2EE room.

That being said the general concept is a problem. I would love to see progress where all events from a user are signed by a device key and non-forgable. There is some thinking about this with portable identities (such as MSC2787) where you server is basically just storing and forwarding events but the root of trust is your identity and keys that you control. But none of this will land soon, not for many years.

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Servers are always going to be owned by someone. But the data is encrypted with keys not available to the server. Signal isn't perfect, and I don't like some stuff they do, but it's the best design out there that is also relatively user friendly and doesn't have holes that are easy to exploit by the server owner.

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Matrix isn't more secure/private than Signal. Both have advantages and disadvantages. Signal has a centralized server, but has no access to the keys to decrypt any of the data flowing through them. Matrix chat rooms live on servers that would theoretically be able to access the data in the rooms, so you need to trust the server owners. Advantage is that multiple servers are involved so no one sever can kill your chat room. With Signal, the disadvantage is if you join a chat room, you can't see any past messages because those are encrypted with keys you don't have access to. Similarly if you move to a new device, that device won't have any of your past conversations because the new device doesn't have the keys for those messages. (though migration is now somewhat possible but done poorly IMHO).

So, they address different concerns. Is your concern keeping your conversations private, or keeping your conversations from being censored? Signal is more secure and private, but more centralized and easier or to fail. Matrix can be secure if you host your own server or explicitly trust the owners of all servers that house your chatrooms to keep them secure and to not sell their servers in the future. Matrix is more distributed, so more difficult to be censored or have your data lost by a single point of failure.

Is it "secure enough" depends on what your concerns are. If you host your own, then it's as secure as you are technically able to keep them secure yourself. Otherwise it depends on the server owner.

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All it takes is a hardware bakdoor.

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Yeah, but it is still just one account per number, so it would make managing alts annoying. Not only is the main client (as well as the major unofficial ones, haven't found one that doesn't do that) not support multiacc directly, forcing use of profiles or VMs, but you're also at risk of whoever rents the associated phone number after you deleting the account (that or you could pay a recurring fee just to retain the number, which is just wasteful).

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Matrix and Simplex is fine but I would recommend Signal for family and friends. Threema is also option but not user friendly for friends and family who wants easy user discovery than sharing userIDs.

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both are good, even Signal. For private conversations, you only need to avoid Telegram and other obvious ones

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@Confidant6198

Signal is fine to use. These days I mostly recommend Delta Chat though. Delta Chat is free, encrypted, open source, audited, decentralised & federated in the same way as email is as it literally is email, it just looks like a chat, and it will work almost out of the box for anyone who has an email address (which is most people). This includes gmail/icloud/outlook etc. There are also chatmail servers you can sign up on if you'd prefer that.

It is no more complicated to configure than it is to configure any other email client. It has group chats, you can even share applications in the chat such as playing games or collaborate etc, all within the security of knowing your email provider can not read your conversations, whilst you still get the benefit of using the existing infrastructure of email.

Check it out: delta.chat/en/

PS. I'm not affiliated with them in any way. In fact, I have no idea if/how they make money. The service "just works" though.

PPS. They are also present in the Fediverse at @delta

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Private against who?

Privacy communities need to really drill in the idea of threat models instead of pretending privacy is some linear scale and the ultimate goal is to bury your phone and computer in a lead-lined concrete block underground. Privacy and security are meaningless concepts unless you know who your are protecting it from and what their capabilities might be. I don't need to hide from NSA Tailored Access Operations because I'm not trying to x the y of the USA. I do need to protect myself from basic scam attackers, copyright trolls and neo-nazi stalkers. And Matrix, along with certain basic opsec guidelines, does that and more for me.

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Matrix/Element is pretty private, but not wide spreaded. For the use with friends and Family is more realisticto use Signal or any other decentralized Chat.

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Matrix.org is centralized like Signal (you can say Matrix is not centralized on paper, but in practice this isn’t remotely true). Both are stockpiling metadata in the West… what’s worse is Matrix’s eventual consistency model means syncing metadata to all servers is a by-design requirement (& also why all servers & clients are slow). There are options like Snikket to take all the hard parts of self-hosting out of the equation, but finding someone you can trust to host a server might be worthwhile. I would be wary of anything centralized.

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Matrix is centralized too in practice … & syncs even more metadata than Signal so I wouldn’t call that an upgrade—especially when you see how slow the clients & servers are.

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It’s worth following the project but it’s a bit too new & the funding aspect leads me to question how it will work in the long run (& being written in Haskell is neat, but boy does it have a lot of churn & maintenance issues in its ecosystem).

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OMEMO is a mixed bag. Some clients are still preferring older versions that aren’t the best for security & almost every client does a bad job explaining that new keys are being used need to be verified… Gajim only recently gave a decent in-client pop-up for it, but it’s doesn’t work all the time. That said, this is basically the same issue Matrix has in the space. Both are based on libsignal if not outright using it, except Signal gets a point of privilege in basically having just one client …one that must be on Android/iOS according to their statements… so they can do a ‘better’ job managing who, what, & how many keys are being used. Many XMPP clients will recommend blind trust by default just because it can be a real hassle to deal with multiple clients & users coming back to less-often-used devices. There have been proposals to fix it, but I haven’t seen anything really take off (meanwhile considering just using the PGP encryption option as less flaky).

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You’re always here to talk to sense into the folks

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It is not. We are on a privacy sub on lemmy, services that require mandatory phone number are far away from been fine to use.

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AFAIK, chat.mozilla.org was set up on modular.im, now element.io, which if it still using the same host, is owned by Matrix.org. So even using a different host means Matrix.org might still have your metadata.

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Matrix is centralized too in practice

There are plenty of different available homeservers and you can host yours.

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Is using an Matrix account from matrix.org private and secure enough to talk with my family members and people in general?