With the many communication platforms out today it’s a hard for I or anyone else for that matter to recommend one that is best for you. One this is similar about many of them today. They all relay on some centralized server to route and store all of your communication. They also store what you have talked about on their servers.
Whoa! Seriously, I kid you not. They do!
This means that at any time they could pull up your chat logs, photos you have sent via chat and one day use them. Now if you are not doing anything via chat that you wouldn’t do in public that isn’t’ a concern to you now is it.
Well!!! Is it?
The point I am making is, all it takes is the wrong person(s) to gain access to your communication platforms servers, databases and your perceived privacy is no more.
So how do we solve such an issue?
Well we have private chat programs that work using peer to peer, but that is complex for the simply day to day user to setup and maintain.
Then we have BitTorrent Chat.
BitTorrent Chat uses public key encryption to protect your privacy. There aren’t “usernames”. You are not required to login to a central server. Instead, your identity is a cryptographic key pair. What does this mean? Well to other users you are simply a public key, meaning you do not need to tell anyone who you are. All you need to do is exchange your public keys with another user so you can communicate.
Benefits:
Using public key encryption provides us with a number of benefits. The most obvious is the ability to encrypt messages to your sender using your private key and their public key. Every time you begin a conversation with one of your contacts, a temporary encryption key will be generated. Using each of your keypairs, this key will be generated for this one conversation and that conversation only, and then deleted forever. So even if someone was able to gain access to your computer to take your private key. The history is gone, gone forever.
All of this is using what is known as BitTorrent encrypted DHT, which is a method used to translate a public key to an IP address, similar to how BitTorrent clients work
So if you are interested sign up for the Private Alpha and let’s start communicating online the way it should be.
Here are some links you might be interest in:
Wikipedia article on BitTorrent’s version of the DHT
Wikipedia article on DHT technology in general
Wikipedia article on public key encryption
Wikipedia article on forward secrecy
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