Green Bubbles

Dec 5 2022 • 1 hr 10 mins

Over the last ten years or so, we’ve seen a huge growth in the number of messaging platforms. With Google recently putting massive pressure on Apple to adopt the RCS standard, I wanted to have a discussion about the security and privacy of the various platforms, especially when we compare them to plain-old SMS.

This episode came about in part due to a Twitter exchange with The Mac Observer, on the back of an article about Google’s RCS push, in which the TMO team mentioned WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger as alternative messaging options. You can imagine that got me somewhat riled up, due to my very public aversion to Meta, so after a nice back and forth with Jeff we agreed to put together this episode to really explore what the various platforms have to offer and why a secure chat app may not always be a private one due to worrying metadata collection practices.

You’ll notice that we focussed mostly on messaging apps, rather than chat apps like Discord or Slack, and that’s really down to the nature of the discussion, as we’re really focussing in on ‘mobile messaging’ with your contacts rather than larger community apps.

Since recording, Sunbird has come along as a way to get iMessage up and running on Android devices. We

We’d absolutely love you to chime in on this one, as I’m sure many of you have differing views on this topic. As long as those views are civil and respectful, we’d love to hear from you, so send a note over to podcast@crossedwires.net, leave a comment on the post, or start a discussion in Goodpods.

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