I hate that we need this.

Eu needs to just block fb en large and be done with it.

The company said the changes are for users in the European Union, in response to evolving EU regulatory feedback

Sounds like a petulant child throwing a tantrum for being told ‘no’.

minimal set of data points including a person’s age, location, gender, and how a person engages with ads.

Sounds like they’re skirting the regulation.

allowing people to connect with the brands and products that are most relevant to them.

“Connecting with brands and products” is not even remotely close to why people use social media.

Tf are they going on about?!

Agreed! When everything is actively against us, we must band together against everything.

If you have a factory pixel, you don’t need to root. You can unlock bootloader and install a rom that has it (calyxos or grapheneos I know have them). You can root, but you don’t have to.

Didn’t know that. Just been manually rebooting. This is is much easier and more secure. Thanks!

🎶 Beauty and the beast

We each have our own levels of acceptable privacy posture. Signal make it easier for the masses to get off, say, Whatsapp and feel little to no real hurdles. I agree with you, though, that the phone number and physical phone requirements are a hard sell for people with a more strict posture requirement, which was the reason it took me long to get on it. But, alas, I had to settle, because SimpleX wasn’t available on iOS at the time (my family and friends are on iphones) and it is much more private that Hangouts or Whatsapp (which I still can’t believe we were on). We did try Matrix for a time, but it wasn’t “production ready” then, which was a deterrent to them as well. Signal being centralized wouldn’t be a huge deterrent for me, if it wasn’t for their continuous push to keep it that way and them actively preventing decentralization, both of which have been scratching me the wrong way for a while. I had a conversation with my groups to switch to something else, but they’re not all on board. Signal, they say, is “as easy as Whatsapp and more private”. I mean… they’re right, but we could have better.

Care to elaborate? I haven’t heard anything concrete against it.

I agree with you. I just don’t think “they” will take that fact and just sit with it. I think “they” will do everything they can to get multiple backdoors in there (and I use the term ‘backdoor’ loosely to mean anything that can programmatically circumvent the encryption). There are more of them, in terms of power and funding, than there are of us. They will eventually succeed, if only for short times each interval. That’s why I wrote that the solution is a chat revolution. I don’t know what that will look like, but we need something they can’t successfully attack.

Edit: autocorrect

Theoretically, yes. But if it’s a legal entity that added it, they can easily circumvent any attempt to eradicate it. Or, in a more extreme way, criminalize FOSS chat apps altogether, then the code will have to be analyzed in a RE environment. Maybe the non FOSS server code is where the backdoor is added. There are so many relatively hidden ways to compromise a chat app’s supply chain.

Honestly, neither will I. No one should.

While I do love your optimism and appreciate the addition of this software to our (collective) arsenal, it absolutely can. Chat Control can force the developers to add back doors, for example, or to start log collection to include IPs and PSPs, etc. Please don’t misunderstand, I’m not negating the benefits of Amnesichat at all. It’s awesome. But, being a chat, it would still fall under the same regulatory nonsense as Briar, for example, which can also be run through Tor. Now, whether the developers adhere to Chat Control regulations, is another thing altogether.

Or Briar. Or Signal. Or so many others that have been audited throughput the years. While I appreciate the addition of Amnesichat to this arsenal, it has yet to be properly audited and is, therefore, not yet trusted.

Chat Control, if passed, will affect this chat as well. The only way to bypass it, would be chat revolution.

Very cool. Thanks for sharing!

That’s a fair point.

I mean… the government already has all your information. If you distrust them with your information, you have an odd problem to overcome. The corpos, however, shouldn’t have all this data on you.

It depends how it’s implemented. If they implement correctly, then you’re right. But not all do. That’s a fact that bit me in the arse once, and I no longer use those features for lack of trust.

If truly masked, it might be fine. But the site has to gather that data in order to append it to the API call and it, therefore, mean that they could keep it (even of they actually may not). There are ways around it, such as with session tokens passed between the social media’s page and the bank’s official API page. But, knowing fb, they won’t use the latter.