Privacy Tools: The Best Encrypted Messaging Programs

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A new ranking of popular encrypted messaging programs finds the ones that are most effective at protecting users' privacy.

A new ranking of popular encrypted messaging programs finds the ones that are most effective at protecting users privacy.

by Julia Angwin ProPublica, Nov. 4, 2014, 9 a.m.

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Ever since former National Security Agency consultant Edward Snowden revealed mass governmental surveillance, my inbox has been barraged with announcements about new encryption tools to keep people's communications safe from snooping.

This is a ranking of encrypted messaging programs based on criteria aimed to assess whether they are well designed to make the content of the messages unreadable to anybody other than the sender and recipient. But even messages that are securely encrypted often do not obscure the identities of the sender and recipient. All rankings

Source: Electronic Frontier Foundation, ProPublica, Joseph Bonneau

But it's not easy to sort out which secret messaging tools offer true security and which ones might be snake oil. So I turned to two experts Joseph Bonneau at Princeton and Peter Eckersley at the Electronic Frontier Foundation for advice about what to look for in encryption tools. Working together, we chose seven technical criteria on which to rank encryption tools.

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Privacy Tools: The Best Encrypted Messaging Programs