this post was submitted on 23 Feb 2025
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Privacy
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I'll take a look at those, thank you. Using one of these is preferable to going the Matrix/Element bridge route, you think? I really like the idea of Matrix, but it was a real pain to get everyone on Signal, and bridging that to Matrix/Element seems kind of complicated and quite possibly less secure (although Signal has its own issues of course) than just using Signal by itself.
Beeper has questionable ownership now, and honestly, I always found their privacy practices questionable at best.
When I was being onboarded for Beeper, when it was still in it's infancy and they had to walk you through the technical setup via an onboarding video call, I asked what promises they could keep about privacy if the company was sold? I asked because the owner of Beeper was the guy who made the Pebble watch and he sold Pebble and I was wondering if the sale would require the privacy policy to stay the same. I never got a response, and then Migicovsky sold it, like I thought he might.
What actually made me ask the question initially was getting into a recorded onboarding session that I had never been warned would be recorded. The first warning I had that they would record the video-call onboarding session was when I logged into the session. They never thought to warn me ahead of time that my voice and onboarding would be recorded. I bowed out and never signed up for Beeper, especially since they never thought it was worth it to answer my questions about privacy practices after having already disrespected my privacy once. It left me with a bad taste in my mouth about their privacy promises if they couldn't even bother to warn me ahead of time that an onboarding session would be recorded.
If you were running your own Matrix server and bridge, you at least know what's happening because you're fully in control of it. But that can be a lot of work where these options are out of the box working at least.
Was the onboarding process recorded?
I suppose it was for other people. I logged out after I got the warning and never got onboarded. I sent a follow up email with questions about their privacy practices, promises, and what would happen if they sold. I never received a response.
This was early in development, I don't think they even have to do onboarding now as they've got all the technical backend details mostly worked out for end-users. This was very early in their existence.
Erg, after all this fuss, Element is kind of hard to use and not very intuitive 🙁
Yeah as much as the other options aren't perfect, it's why I went with KDE connect. 😔
I am in the process of setting up my own Matrix server but it's my first time using Ansible so who knows how that will go. Ugh.
Yeesh, doesn't sound too good on their part. An interesting story, thanks for taking the time to write all that. I will now go ahead and cross Beeper off my list.
Wise concern. I never tried Beeper, either, despite becoming eligible from the waitlist.