Telegram is giving away FREE Premium subscriptions! All they need from you is to use your cell phone as a relay to text out their OTP codes! And the recipient of the OTP sees your phone number! What could POSSIBLY go wrong with this deal?

PLEASE don’t use Telegram! I personally recommend Matrix as it’s totally FOSS, you can self host, there are tons of front end clients to choose from. Or even use Signal. I have my own issues with Signal, the fact they don’t allow third party clients, you can’t self-host, they have a proprietary shim in their stack that only they know what it does, they were pushing crypto, etc, but at least Signal is better than this garbage.

  • communism
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    3 months ago

    Signal is fine for a drop-in WhatsApp replacement. I use it for chatting to my friends casually. For something you need more security for you could do encrypted emails as that doesn’t require exchanging phone numbers, or ideally just arrange to meet up in-person and discuss things so you don’t leave any kind of digital or paper trail.

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        3 months ago

        Obviously you don’t have your phones on you. Otherwise what’s the point of meeting up in person.

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            3 months ago

            Not if I don’t need to, like if I need to have a conversation with someone that doesn’t need to be overheard. In any case turning your phone off and putting it in a faraday bag then putting it somewhere relatively noiseproof should be more than enough if you need to bring your phone with you.

            • onlinepersona@programming.dev
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              3 months ago

              Sounds like something everyone does for sure. When I sit in public transport or go out to eat, nobody has their phone one them, and if they ever do, it’s safely tucked away in a faraday cage 👍

              CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

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                3 months ago

                Most people are not privacy-conscious. I don’t get what your problem is. If you won’t do something just because the majority of people don’t, then why are you on !privacy@lemmy.ml? Go back to Facebook and Twitter and Google then