Dragon Hacks: Slay Snoopers

It’s time for another quick and easy ‘dragon hack’. Today I’ll tell you how to stop people from snooping on your communications.

Meet Your Foe: Spying Message Apps

Since the dawn of the World Wide Web, we’ve had proprietary messaging apps: AOL Instant Messenger (AIM), Yahoo Messenger and MSN Messenger were probably the most popular. If you wanted to talk to someone else, they had to have an account on the same service. There were attempts to unify the messaging clients (who remembers Trillian, Adium or Pidgin?) and a short-lived attempt at an open, standard message format (XMPP, most famously used by the Jabber client). But companies zealously promoted their proprietary clients because they wanted control over your data and your attention. Today, if anything, it’s gotten worse. We have Facebook Messenger, Telegram, WhatsApp, WeChat, Teams, Discord, Slack… the list is long, and none of them work together. For the foreseeable future, messaging will remain fractured and proprietary.

But here’s the real kicker: most of these apps are not truly private. That is, they either don’t have true end-to-end encryption (E2EE) or the maker of the app itself spies on your messages to sell you stuff – or BOTH. They lock you in with the network effect – it’s where all your friends are – and they’re very good at leveraging and extending this advantage. But you can break these chains. And you should. Start now.

Wield Your Weapon: Signal

Yep. That Signal. I’m not going to get into that whole debacle, but the issue there was NOT the Signal app. Signal is widely regarded by security professionals as the gold standard of secure communications. It’s not perfect – and should not be used on private phones to discuss highly classified information. But for people like you and me, it’s great. There are other very secure messaging apps, but Signal is the Easy Button option. It has a lot of users (particularly after “Signalgate”), it’s easy to use, it has most of the features you want in a messaging app, and it has top-notch encryption. Oh… and did I mention that you can also do voice and video calls on Signal? That includes group calls. And they’re all fully end-to-end encrypted.

I have a longer article here, but here’s the short version of how to get started with Signal:

1. Install the Signal app on your smartphone.
2. Follow the on-screen instructions to register your account.
3. Find one other person to do the same thing… takes two to tango.

That’s it. Note that you can choose a username so you don’t have to give out your phone number. If you want to get super-secure, check out this great article from Privacy Guides on hardening Signal. Lifehacker also has some great tips.

Bask in the Glory

You now have a means by which you can communicate with others securely and privately, without worrying that what you’re saying might be mined to target you with ads – or, in our politically charged climate, get you on some “list” you don’t want to be on. It should have always been this way, but it’s just not. But it can be.

Continue Your Quest

Your next objective should be to get as many of your friends and family to join you as possible. Are you tired of dealing with the Android/iOS green bubble vs blue bubble crap? Move your group chats to Signal. Want to make sure your political rantings don’t come back to haunt you? Turn on disappearing messages.

You can also use Signal on your computer or tablet. The app is tied to your cell phone always – that’s the primary device. But you can install Signal on your Mac or PC or your iPad or whatever, and all the messages will sync between your devices. You just have to link those devices back to your phone.