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Comment by walterbell | Hacker News Reader

These days, it's challenging to minimize the amount of information given to commercial communication vendors. At present, https://Wire.com (from Skype's founder) is the only cross-platform and easily usable messaging service that:

  - has E2E encryption [0] of text, image, audio, video
  - does not require phone # [1]
  - does not require address book upload
  - is not ad-supported
  - has open-sourced code for their desktop and mobile clients
  - has single msg editing & deletion

[0] derived from the Signal protocol, implemented in Rust, needs more external review/audit, https://wire.com/privacy/

[1] using a desktop browser, register at http://app.wire.com with email, then login to mobile app

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> Wire is not financed by ads. Your personal data or the content of your conversations are never sold or rented to anyone, and it will not be used for any third party advertising.

Does anyone know how it's financed? Without a clear business model, it's hard to trust anyone these days. If it was an open source project just for the sake of having an open source solution, that'd be one thing, but the website mentions Jobs, and has a web-based app run by them, so there's real money being invested here, and at some point they'll have to reap profits from it.

Their Twitter account [0] mentioned plans for paid premium services. Features are being added at a steady pace (monthly?), so this seems plausible.

Rdio (common investor) lasted five years, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rdio

If they go under, it may be possible to build an open-source client+server that is inspired by their current OSS client. In fact, that effort can start now, as an insurance policy.

Edit: found a Mar 2016 interview with Janus Friis (who is financing and chairing the company), they have 50 employees in Berlin and are seeing 150K new user signups per month, http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-03-10/amid-apple...

[0] https://twitter.com/wire

Tox[1] meets all of these points except for

    - has single msg editing & deletion

And who cares about that? It is also:

    - a distributed P2P network with no proprietary or centralized services
    - no email requirement
    - Linux support (advertising "cross-platform support" without Linux is a fucking joke)

It's not perfect but I think it's a far better place to invest our mindshare.

[1]: https://tox.chat/

Even an open-source client is hard to trust as a native install in your mobile OS. Sooo many ways your phone is insecure...

Although don't get me wrong.. I like what they're doing here.

iOS is not bad for mainstream users if the right privacy settings are enabled.

Since the baseband processor is a major attack point on a mobile device, it's a big deal that Wire does not need a phone number. It means you can use a WiFi-only device like an iPod Touch or non-cellular tablet.

In the bigger picture, we have to stop supporting companies whose business model is based on data harvesting. Wire is a small step in the right direction. We need more steps and more alternatives.

Are there any that do metadata obscurity?

Would love to know.

Wire reduces metadata, e.g. no phone number and no social network/contact graph for triangulation. You can use a throwaway email to register, that is never used in other contexts. That leaves metadata for device key fingerprints, Wire account ID and public IP addresses.

Wire also uses WebRTC for some communication, not sure about the metadata implications of that protocol.

You would need to use a messaging app that routes your traffic over Tor, or some other anonymizing network. Some options like Ricochet or Tor Messenger are being developed.

I2P Messenger, I2P's Bote mail

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