Unlike in the past, today most communication is done online through various forms of messaging.
And the most popular type of online communication is instant messaging. People use popular messaging applications such as Whatsapp, Wechat, Line and others to communicate in their day to day life.
But is this form of messaging secure and private?
In most cases it is not.
Unfortunately most messaging applications are not secure from the prying eyes of governments and corporations. Instead of helping you, they actually help the governments who monitor them. Especially in non-democratic countries.
This is especially true for something like Wechat which is based in China and must adhere to strict government censorship and monitoring guidelines.
But it is also true for messaging applications like Whatsapp which may contain back-doors for governments to use. Not to mention being run by a company (Facebook) with notorious privacy concerns.
But there some secure messaging apps which we really like. Applications that actually put privacy first.
For example Telegram, which although started in Russia, had to leave Russia because they refused to give the government access to their privacy keys. A company willing to stand up for privacy rights is a company we approve of.
We have gone through some of these in our secure messaging guide and we will be adding more in theĀ future.