Decentralized is the Future

A lot of people recently read the new Whatsapp privacy policy and freaked out , Ironically on their Whatsapp Stories.

The New privacy  policy doesn't affect the general users a lot and mainly concerns businesses , but I think it is a step in the right direction that the users started thinking a little bit before clicking on I agree and moving on with their lives.

This time people thought a little bit about how this might affect them. Telegram and Signal both apps saw a large increase in their user-base and honestly my telegram was flooded with people joining in.

The problem

This is a shift in the right direction but this comes with problems of its own . I mean there was time back before Whatsapp was evil and decided to share all our data with Facebook. The problem is not with Whatsapp but the very Idea of centralized services.

Centralized services mean services which have a central server controlled by a giant corporation. Signal and Telegram are also centralized and so is Whatsapp. One day Facebook decides to go out and buy Whatsapp and start collecting all the data from it . What is preventing some chat app such as Signal or Telegram from turning evil and collecting all our data. This is hence going to be a rat race wherein we will be switching from service to service to  keep our data safe .

The solution

Use decentralized(federated) services.   Services such as matrix and XMPP run on a different principle , You don't have rely on some huge corporation's server to chat ; you can run your own server and use that to interact with other people who are on other servers as well . Some examples for open matrix and XMPP servers are poddery.com, diasp.in, matrix.org . If anyone running these servers decides to go corrupt you can just hop onto another one and start using their services .

Personally I'd recommend joining matrix if you are a concerned about this problem as I am . But that is only because I am not very familiar with XMPP

PS : A lot of people have often told me about End to End encryption in Whatsapp but I don't think it can be trusted since the key using which the messages are encrypted is managed by Whatsapp themselves . They have access to the key and hence they can probably decrypt and read your messages.

PS 2.0: Also in no way am I trying to imply that Telegram and Signal arent viable alternatives to Whatsapp.