With all the revelations of internet surveillance all around the internet after Edward Snowden incident, people and the tech industry have become more wary of privacy and security of their documents and conversations. Some tech companies have taken this opportunity to add encryption and many other techniques to their applications and claim protection against internet surveillance to get to the people who are paranoid about their privacy. Many new softwares, messengers, cloud companies and email providers have emerged during this time and claim to provide protection for the users.
But an average user isn’t able to dissect an application to figure out if the application or a service is truly secure. So EFF.org has released a Secure Messaging Scorecard to list out the most used messaging clients from multiple platforms and created a checklist of what they offer as a privacy feature for the users. While there are some paid services, there are a few opensource and free services everyone can start using right away.
Here is the most popular apps used for messaging currently and their privacy feature check list.
Some of the applications listed as secure and free are listed below:
ChatSecure (Android/iPhone)
CryptoCat (Multiplatform: Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Opera, OS X, iPhone)
Jitsi (Multiplatform: Stable: Windows, Mac, Linux; Experimental: Android
RetroShare (Multiplayform: Linux, Mac, Windows)
And there is the full list of apps and their score in the privacy features. The list is just to check if your app has the policies that you want to have. If you want more information about the specific app, please click the image below to be directed to the EFF page.
What do you think of all of this discussions about privacy and intense internet surveillance by Governments. Let us know in comments.
