this post was submitted on 24 Jul 2023
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Privacy
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“For example, if you send a message from Beeper to a friend on WhatsApp, the message is encrypted on your Beeper client, sent to the Beeper web service, which decrypts and re-encrypts the message with WhatsApp's proprietary encryption protocol.”
So, not really end to end for most common use-cases.
Yeah I got my invite last week. But between the time it was announced and looking into it, I’ve balked and won’t use it.
That said I’m considering self hosting
https://github.com/beeper/self-host
I was thinking it was something like what pidgin does on desktop, adapted for mobile, and was highly enthusiastic, but realized it works using matrix bridges and doesn't process locally...
Well, at least it can be self hosted.
Given this is !privacy and the advertise as front page features both “works will all your messaging apps” and “end to end encryption”, it seems important to flag currently those aren’t mutually compatible.
It’s not their fault the apps don’t have e2e APIs, it’s a tough problem, but the secrecy and privacy guarantee is just “trust us to stick to our policy”. And they’re a start-up, tooling isn’t perfect (or even exist), mistakes happen, etc
Their self-hosting looks interesting, but then it said to use your own clients too, which took the fun out of that.
You can use Element, which is essentially the same thing as Beeper's client:
https://element.io/