Matrix Is Not Safe for EU Data Privacy? (wire.com)

I can't really evaluate some of their claims, but note that this is published by a company (written by a "Tech Marketer" who works there) that has a vested interest in making its product look better than the competition. The overly-alarmist language they use makes me extra skeptical.

Matrix may not be safe but is Wire going to be safe from Chat Control? Most likely no. So I don't see how trading one surveillance state for another will help.

I don't see how Wire is any safer if they operate in Germany. The EU is perfectly able to go against Wire then.

Written by Wire, a competitor.

Wire audited themselves and found nothing wrong in themselves

The only safe communication is decentralized communication, capable of multiplexing multiple techniques (IP, BLE, LoRa, etc.) under the hood of cryptographically safe routing and messaging algorithms that work over unreliable links.

Maybe even with small-range offline radio mailboxes so you can deliver and gather messages from/to highly suppressed people which then can be send back into the "online" network automatically without further interaction.

Unfortunately we have had to remove Matrix-Element from production after user frustration and concerns with quality. While the concept is excellent, the implementation of Element is janky and caused so much friction that users would not depend on it. Concerns about other potential issues become more common within the technical team when the frontend has become substandard in a professional environment.

What does this even mean? Matrix can be hosted by anyone and anywhere with full control, unlike wire which is a centralized chat app owned by AWS

This article is fundamentally false - we addressed it on https://element.io/blog/addressing-fear-uncertainty-and-doub...

dang: is HN really the place for competitive marketing crap like this?

Weird argument: "they are in the UK, which is not in the EU, bouh! Look at us, we are in Switzerland, which is... also not in the EU..."

Even if I dislike Matrix for various reasons, it is absolutely ridiculous to point to a completely centralized AND closed system as an alternative. Terrible article.

There is of course also the fact that the EU is not a sovereign state, legitimate government, or any kind of legitimate government at all, not to mention that is it an abrogation and disassembly of democratic principles of self-determination, and inherently foreign and even hostile to all its members, the most dominant of which jockeying over control of all of Europe through the EU.

I don't know if Matrix is "safe" or not, but I usually avoid companies that attack companies like this. Not a good look in my view.

I am a Wire user. I am not happy that, if their server goes down, all the text and images that I shared with other users will become unavailable to me. As a special case, I am not able to look at my own old messages while using my laptop on the airplane, as the Linux client is just a webview. On the phone, it works.

Backups half-way solve the issue with text messages - I would still need to contact someone with sufficient development skills to decrypt the backup and extract the text in a readable form, but the information is there.

But with images, there is no recovery. And they apparently already lost some of my photos (the placeholder for some of them never gets replaced with the actual photo when I scroll up to year 2023).

Add to that the incompatible backup formats between the desktop and mobile apps.

So this is definitely not the claimed data sovereignty.

I don't know that running a smear campaign against an open protocol to hock your paid alternative makes me trust you with my data, personally.

wire is centralized unlike matrix so any "they have to follow the law of the country they are based/hosted in" critique is a self own.

wire continues to be a clown show.

Wire used to be relatively fine, but there are better alternatives, and Matrix is one of them, as it is not centralized, despite the most commonly used, namely Element, being "chunky" or whatever. In any case, this is written by Wire, a competitor, so take it with a pinch of salt.

In my opinion this is a poor, vendor-originated commentary attempting to spread FUD and drive people to a product. Not worth reading, and I wish I didn't.