Five years ago today, on May 15, 2021, WhatsApp’s controversial new privacy policy came into effect. The update sparked global criticism and raised public awareness of the economic incentives behind data-driven online platforms. With users spending more time online, ever-growing volumes of data, and powerful new AI systems, the concerns raised back then are now even more justified than in 2021.
The number of cyber incidents has been rising for years, and attacks on companies are becoming more aggressive and increasingly sophisticated. These worrying trends pose new organizational and financial challenges for companies.
With its legislative proposal known as “Chat Control,” the EU Commission is trying to establish an unprecedented mass-surveillance apparatus of Orwellian proportions in the European Union. If EU citizens don’t stand up for privacy now, it may be too late.
The cybersecurity expert Bruce Schneier has recently published an interesting blog post in which he (together with co-author Barath Raghavan) argues that online privacy is continuing to decline for the same reason overfishing occurred in the last century – due to the “Shifting Baseline Syndrome.” The presented analogy is a powerful one, but we still feel that it falls flat in some regards, and in reality, online privacy might even be worse off than suggested.
For the longest time, Swiss German was exclusively a spoken language – everything written had to be in standard German. This has changed with the emergence of chat apps like Threema: with its informal character, instant messaging helped dialects find their way into written communication.
Voice messages polarize: while some use this feature on a daily basis, others prefer to keep their hands off it. Whichever camp you belong to: the most recent Threema update for iOS has something for everyone, sporting a new look for voice messages and adding the option to star messages.
Over the past days, two popular chat services have accused each other of having undisclosed government ties. According to Signal president Meredith Whittaker, Telegram is not only “notoriously insecure” but also “routinely cooperates with governments behind the scenes.” Telegram founder Pavel Durov, on the other hand, claims that “the US government spent $3M to build Signal’s encryption” and Signal’s current leaders are “activists used by the US state department for regime change abroad.”
Threema Work’s management cockpit has received one of the most extensive updates in years. Not only was the user management completely redesigned, but various useful features were added to help administrators manage users in a more intuitive and efficient manner.
Federation is sometimes considered the system of the future. It’s not surprising, therefore, that federated chat services are becoming more popular in certain circles. Although their advantage is that they are not dependent on a single server operator, there are a number of major drawbacks in terms of security and privacy protection compared to centrally managed solutions.
Imagine searching for an address, a restaurant recommendation, or anything else you’ve recently received via Threema – but you don’t remember who sent it. That’s where the new global search in Threema for iOS comes in handy: it allows you to search across all individual, group, and archived chats at once.
