cross-posted from: https://kbin.projectsegfau.lt/m/tech@kbin.social/t/26889
Google just announced that all RCS conversations in Messages are now fully end-to-end encrypted, even in group chats. RCS stands for Rich Communication Services and is replacing traditional text and picture messaging, providing you with more dynamic and secure features. With RCS enabled, you can share high-res photos and videos, see typing indicators for your…
As an Apple owner I hope Apple will implement this too. I live in a country where everybody communicates through WhatsApp unfortunately.
What do you mean? iMessage is fully end to end encrypted.
As far as google messages RCS goes, that’s googles proprietary version of RCS.
I think they might mean they wish Apple would support RCS in general (which Apple has been refusing to do)
For good reason. Honestly anyone pushing for RCS is an idiot or doesn’t understand what they are pushing for.
Among many issues (including E2E missing by default) the idea of giving any control back to carriers is just stupid.
You’d rather have the yellow billion dollar company have full control instead of the cyan one? Who cares, it makes no difference! 🤷
At least RCS is a standard. That’s not a big plus in this particular case, but it is one, and none of the other walled gardens have an equivalent thing to even bring to the table.
Google RCS and RCS the standard are not the same thing. Third party apps are not allowed to plug into Google RCS. This is why you won’t find any RCS open source alternative for Google Messages.
Google is just trying to promote their own walled garden under the guise of an open standard. If they were genuine about this they should allow you to just use any replacement, just like you can replace the stock SMS app on Android.
Look at that ratio, must be a lot of us idiots around huh
iMessage is not fully E2E encrypted unless you have advanced data protection turned on. If you don’t, the keys to your conversations still rest on Apple’s servers.
That’s untrue. The keys are generated on your device and Apple doesn’t have those stored. You need apple devices to grant access for another device as Apple doesn’t have your key. There’s other security holes where apple can generate new keys but that doesn’t change the fact that it is actually E2E encrypted.
I don’t think it’s true as long as you don’t make iCloud Backups
This is the correct answer.
No that’s only for iCloud backups of your iMessages.
It’s full E2E encryption even without that turned on. However, just because something is encrypted doesn’t mean it’s secure, as you point out.
Regardless, governments/organizations have gotten very good at finding vulnerabilities and exploiting them before academic and/or private sector security groups discover the same vulnerabilities, who will then go and publish their findings which eventually leads to them getting patched. As a side note: For anyone interested in some modern hacker/cybersecurity history, I recommend reading the book, Sandworm by Andy Greenberg. It’s pretty damn wild what it covers and that’s only a fraction of the modern state of global cyber warfare (and yes, just about the entire world has been engaged in what pretty much amounts to cyber warfare/espionage/sabotage for the last 10-15+ years).
WhatsApp is already E2E encrypted, it always has been. There’s a circlejerk around here about “not true E2E!”, but that’s just straight up nonsense.
but still leaks a lot of metadata to Facebook/Meta
Name, service start date, last seen date, IP address, and email address, that’s it. Proof here. Everything Google and Apple also collect. If that’s a problem for you use Signal, not iMessage.
I get that, but Meta/Facebook has a massive track record of not giving a shit about its users. I wouldn’t recommend trusting them, they’ve shown their true colors many times over.
You don’t have to trust them, you shouldn’t trust any of them, but your messages are encrypted nonetheless