Huh, first I’ve seen that writeup. First in-depth well-reasoned set of criticisms I’ve read on the XMPP+OMEMO setup, which is my goto and usual recommendation (and what I still find most power-efficient on a degoogled phone, most usable and reliable despite its stagnation).

Gives a good overview of the accumulated technical debt/chaos beneath the surface. Really hope that conversations and omemo can sort out their mess, or that other clients like kaidan can rise up and push omemo forward, because xmpp itself has been a solid foundation.

https://tosdr.org/ for summaries.

Conversations is excellent for XMPP, but only available on android.

For iOS/MacOS Monal, for iOS Siskin, for Linux/Windows Gajim.

Sure, an individual can prevent their own devices collecting data about them, but the paper is about all the devices surrounding a person in other people’s pockets/homes/workplaces: collecting data on – recording – that individual.

[…] The researchers discovered that even if individual users turned off data tracking and didn’t share their own information, their mobility patterns could still be predicted with surprising accuracy based on data collected from their acquaintances.

“Worse,” says Ghoshal, “almost as much latent information can be extracted from perfect strangers that the individual tends to co-locate with.”

In many (most?) jurisdictions it is illegal to make a recording of a conversation either which you are not party to, or without consent of all parties involved; sometimes with consideration towards whether there was reasonable expectation that the conversation be private. Even when legal, there are often restrictions on how that recording can be used.

The laws aren’t always written specific to audio/video recording (not that always-recording by google/apple/amazon/etc isn’t a problem already…) – how does such surveillance figure in to existing legislation around the world?