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Crackdown on open source E2EE apps in India
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 01 Jan 2025
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Privacy
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The majority of users on Lemmy are probably not from India, I would say our userbase skews US/Europe.
This is a very, very interesting and important story, if it's true.
Do you have any other evidence of this happening? It's okay if your sources are not in English, that's just the nature of local media, it speaks the local language.
Would love to hear more about this from your perspective, @Ritsu4Life@lemmy.world because this is a big, important issue that needs discussion if it's really happening. Please expand your thoughts and any evidence you may have in the comments section, please and thank you.
Finally, thank you for bringing this to our attention at all. Cheers.
Thanks for the comment. I haven't found any local news for this. I may update this once I find any
And for my story: A guy came from the police station he had a list all the people who were using "signal, element and bip (not open source, full of ads but encrypted) and a buch more end to end encrypted apps. Shown my mobile number, address and my name.
Told me why I was using signal and element and also had to show my chats. Didn't look at all the chats, was curious tho.
Said that these apps were used by terrorist and all and you should switch to WhatsApp.
WhatsApp runs India. It is a backbone all Indian users and it is also e2ee for all I know
That's very curious. The push to WhatsApp is especially interesting considering it is owned by Meta/Facebook, which is a company that has a long history of working with the US government for extrajudicial surveillance of the US populace. I wonder if they're working with the Indian government in a similar capacity.
As such, I fully personally expect WhatsApp to have officially sanctioned government backdoors. If they're willing to build them for the US government, maybe they're building them for the Indian government, too. Which is perhaps why there is a push towards the corporate, non-open solution, because the other options have more ways for individuals to avoid backdoors.
We really need more community owned and operated communications groups, like the barbed wire telephone of the past.
There could be another reason for pushing towards WhatsApp. If the police have operatives in anti government protest groups only on a single platform, they already know everyone in them via their phone numbers and can monitor them more easily. Signal in contrast has the option to hide your phone number and only expose a username to the public.
don't worry, the app of all participants knows all the numbers, they just dont show them on the UI. a patched app will show them just as well
https://community.signalusers.org/t/beta-feedback-for-the-upcoming-android-7-0-release/59024/51
the feature got implemented in this commit: https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/commit/bb30535afb79c8570fc7aa75b56d03892be6b70f