Why do you care?
If it’s just about following the rules as a matter of principle, I suggest not doing that. Nobody is checking, and saying your exact age on public social media is oversharing anyway.
If it’s about content moderation being strict enough to satisfy some comfort level, I wouldn’t rely on that, but I also think 13 is old enough to start learning there are shitty people online and how to deal with them, preferably with some adult support.
Android, iOS, or desktop?
I’ve noticed the occasional slow delivery, but I have had reason to believe the recipient has an unstable internet connection when that has happened.
When I have a reason to use a Chromium-based browser, it’s usually Ungoogled Chromium. Otherwise, I use Firefox, and I’ve been playing with Waterfox in case Firefox ever asks me to agree to the terms of service that were discussed a little while back.
signal got overloaded, experience degraded
I did not experience this, and I’ve been using Signal daily for years. Prior to 2020 or so, I experienced more unreliability and hesitated to recommend it to the average person.
I’m familiar with the problem though; in most of the EU and probably other places WhatsApp usage is so high that it’s a major inconvenience to avoid it entirely.
A fair number of my contacts from countries where this is true also have Signal. If you don’t, I suggest installing it and seeing how many people are there.
If it’s hard to remember who uses what, start conversations from the contacts app instead of one of the messaging apps; in most cases it will tell you.
I don’t think any evidence has come to light that WhatsApp’s end-to-end encryption of message contents is broken, but it’s also impossible to prove that it is correct because the client is not open source.
Kind of weird it wasn’t included for awhile.
A long while starting with the Fenix rewrite in 2020. What’s bizarre is they took a very tightly controlled approach to rolling out extensions instead of developing in the open and giving users the option to choose for themselves whether to use less stable features or untested extensions.
It was kind of bizarre; the attitude is more what I’d expect from Apple than an open source project. There was very little communication to the public about their reasoning, and what they did offer was pretty unsatisfying.
I think even something like Drip is not sufficient in this kind of situation. If the police can compel someone to unlock their phone and decrypt data, then being local-only won’t stop them. Of course it’s a lot easier to ensure that no data exists if it’s local-only and something happens that might attract the interest of the police.
Nothing in this comment should be construed as legal advice.
I suppose the distinctions between the OS and “just an app” are blurred on any OS. One might argue anything that isn’t the kernel is just userland software on conventional Linux.
On Android, anything a third party could deliver without system or root privileges is “just an app”. That includes keyboards, launchers, messaging apps, image editors, and smarthome device managers, but not direct management of network connections, notifications, or direct interaction with other apps (i.e. outside of intents or over the network).
If you’ve used an Android device with root access, you’ve seen things that fail this test. Anything that needs root to work can’t be delivered to most Android users unless it’s part of the OS or a system app.
I’m not sure what the best answer to that is. I don’t think it’s forcing Google to improve its search results.
I want it to be the average person gaining a baseline level of computer and media literacy such that they seek out and find apps that cannot send sensitive data to third parties without the user’s clear intent, but I don’t think we’ll ever get there.
The launcher is, but not everything new in Android 16 could be just an app. The new desktop mode, for example likely requires much deeper integration with the OS.
Would the cops come beating my door down claiming I had an abortion? 🤔
I don’t think that has happened starting from a period tracking app yet. There was a case involving an unencrypted messaging app used to discuss a criminalized abortion.
So why the fuck don’t women just use that?
They probably don’t know about it. If I search “period tracker” on Google Play, Drip is in about 40th place in the results. That’s several screens down, past a bunch of search suggestions, and the parts where it’s open source, on-device, and optionally encrypted aren’t clear until I tap on it and read the description.
And you probably can’t even get drip on iPhones.
There’s some irony in a comment dealing with people making decisions that are against their interests because they’re insufficiently informed speculating incorrectly about something like this when it’s easy to check. Drip is, in fact available for iPhone.
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These are all app features, not OS features.
When Microsoft first proposed something like that a couple decades ago, it was widely seen as the nightmarish corporate power grab it was. Even mainstream, non-techy publications were critical.
I believe this is how the higher levels of Android’s Play Integrity system work.
It is.
How the fuck did this become acceptable?
You can editorialize in the body on Lemmy; there’s no need to use a title that obscures what the link is about.
It passed the house with a veto-proof majority and the senate unanimously. It is almost certain to become law whether the governor signs it or not.
Isn’t Microsoft Authenticator just a password manager and TOTP app? You can replace it with Bitwarden and Aegis (or a dozen alternatives).
This is a battle big tech cannot afford to lose.
I don’t like this framing. This is about privacy for all of us, and some of the most important providers of encryption software and encrypted services are nonprofits and small companies.
How were they revealed?