

Signal is generally the privacy expert's choice for secure comms, but your aunt might not have it. Messaging apps only work when the people you want to message are on them. Now the choice of medium to send confidential information gets a little more complicated - so much so that even the privacy nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation does not recommend any single messaging app. Even the privacy nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation does not recommend any single messaging app. Other features allow you to send messages anonymously. Messaging apps may come with other security features: the ability to set messages to self destruct, which matters if you're concerned about someone who lives in the same house or shares your device more than a sleuthing hacker. Or perhaps you've backed up your entire chat history in the cloud. Even without reading your texts, law enforcement could make deductions from its metadata - like who you've been talking to and when - or from your uploaded contact list. What the messaging service keeps on their servers also matters. To anybody without your private key - including the app company or a government that comes for the data later - the text is indecipherable.

Messages sent to you are encrypted with your public key and can only be opened with the private key. It works by giving every user of an app a public key and a private key. Short of whispering words into another person's ear, it's difficult to guarantee that no one else will ever be eavesdropping.įor anything you wouldn't want to be seen by your ISP or used against you in a court of law, end-to-end encryption is necessary. The options are endless - iMessage, Slack, Instagram, WhatsApp, Skype, Snapchat - but their security is variable. So you want to send a short, instant, text-based dispatch to another human.
