Since it can’t (shouldn’t) use your phone’s contact list of phone numbers to match you with friends to talk to, it uses a much more secure method of establishing connections between people.īriar even integrates with the Ripple Panic Button software which allows you to create one button that does a series of modifications to whichever apps you choose. It’s only there to secure the app on your device. All you need is a made-up name and password, and the password isn’t sent anywhere. None of your information goes to a centralized server.įurthermore, you don’t have to put any personal information into Briar. With Briar, all messaging is peer-to-peer only with full encryption. This app does a similar “mesh network” thing where messages are transferred via Bluetooth without requiring full internet access, but it also supports transferring messages over peer-to-peer WiFi networks as well as the internet-connected onion router network (Tor). There’s another messaging app called Briar that sounds like it was specifically designed for technological and internet freedom fighting. You can’t really do that with phone numbers.Īt that point, you’re probably not nearly as secure as you would want to be when you’re fighting for freedom. For example, if I make a specific email alias address for only Facebook use, then I start getting emails from somewhere other than Facebook, now I know that Facebook is the one that shared my contact info. Many people do this, not only to understand who sells their contact info to other people/companies, but to also be able to block them by deleting the compromised alias.

(You could also get SIM swapped and lose lots of money and access to many of your other digital accounts, but that’s another story.)įurthermore, you have no way of monitoring who does what with your phone number! As an aside, if you use email as a personal identifier online, you do have much more control over knowing who does what with that address because you can freely create email aliases for every external database that you register with. Who knows what they’ll do with it? And your phone number can easily be used to identify you and track many things that you do with that phone number. Next, it’s always a bad idea to put your real phone number into any kind of external database.

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