Skip to content
New issue

Have a question about this project? Sign up for a free GitHub account to open an issue and contact its maintainers and the community.

By clicking “Sign up for GitHub”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy statement. We’ll occasionally send you account related emails.

Already on GitHub? Sign in to your account

Zom and his unclear Privacy Features #628

Open
githubboy1 opened this issue Sep 10, 2018 · 4 comments
Open

Zom and his unclear Privacy Features #628

githubboy1 opened this issue Sep 10, 2018 · 4 comments

Comments

@githubboy1
Copy link

githubboy1 commented Sep 10, 2018

The website Zom.im very unclear.
No link in the "Privacy Features" placeholder and when I put my heart into their email form it just gave me 405 error.

Can please someone tell me whats the differents is between chatsecure and Zom?

lets make some clear to me:

  • Zom is exactly the same as chatsecure and conversations?
  • Zom got built in mechanisms like XMPP and use the same encryption like Chatsecure or Conversations?
  • Does it support Encrypted group conversations?
  • This app like an app for children, why??
  • Why doesn't tell it privacy of the user on there website?
  • Does the apk download update himself?
  • 'Many advanced features will be hidden or removed for the sake of simplicity' which advanced features are this?

yeah it makes some bold promises but isn't it true that maybe only 10 months ago we all would have said Yahoo was secure, and we all know how that turned out. 1 billion accounts stolen so how trustful is zom exactly?

@githubboy1 githubboy1 changed the title the website zom.io had no security & privacy mechanisms? Zom the same als Chatsecure and Conversations? Sep 11, 2018
@githubboy1 githubboy1 changed the title Zom the same als Chatsecure and Conversations? Zom and his unclear Privacy Features Sep 11, 2018
@iamironrabbit
Copy link

It seems like you would be most happy using Conversations or ChatSecure, so why not just stick with those? We aren't here to satisfy the needs of everyone, and there are many apps out there for you to choose from. All of our code is free and open-source, as well, so we have nothing to hide.

There are also many people in the world who don't understand or care about acronyms like XMPP, XEP, E2E, OMEMO, OTR, etc. This terminology is intimidating and makes them feel like an app is not built for them. They want something that is simple to use, yet ensures their privacy. There are many people who like designs, colors, stickers that are fun and playful as well (just see Line, WeChat, Snapchat stickers and filters), not just children. We chose to not make something that looks like a "security app" because Zom is really just meant for friends and family to stay in touch, with the privacy they deserve.

While we can, and maybe will, put list of technical features somewhere on the website, it will really only be able to make someone like yourself happy, and won't do anything for the rest of the people in the world who want an alternative to WhatsApp, WeChat, Line, etc...

The short answer to all your questions is that Zom supports end-to-end encryption using OMEMO and OTR, for both one-to-one and group conversations. The iOS app is in sync with the upstream ChatSecure iOS codebase, as you can see in this very repo. The Android app is a fork of the old ChatSecure Android, and utilizes the Smack XMPP libraries for all of the OMEMO encryption, along with well known libraries like SQLCipher and IOCipher.

Our servers are run using Prosody server, based on the standard establish here: https://www.calyxinstitute.org/projects/public_jabber_xmpp_server If you want to test how compliant we are with standards, you can run this tool yourself: https://github.com/iNPUTmice/ComplianceTester against our server at "home.zom.im"

If you have any more questions, feel free to email us at [email protected] or respond here. Again, it really does seem like Zom was not made for you, but fortunately you have many other choices.

@githubboy1
Copy link
Author

githubboy1 commented Sep 13, 2018

i give you a bigger answer to your message later because i have not much time now.
But i have one big problem with Zom and that is that i (and others) don't get any notification/announcement when we got a new message.
Only when we open the app, then suddenly we get our messages, and then we close the app, we got no
notifications anymore when we receive new messages.
So the app most be open all time if we want messages anytime. very irritating.
This problem is on both android and ios phone's.
Is this to fix?

@ghost
Copy link

ghost commented Feb 14, 2019

@iamironrabbit

The iOS app is in sync with the upstream ChatSecure iOS codebase, as you can see in this very repo.

Why is the last commit here from September 2018 and the last version published on App Store from December 2018?

@iamironrabbit
Copy link

We held the September 2018 build in testflight for a long time while we upgraded our server infrastructure. The same build was released to the public in December.

Sign up for free to join this conversation on GitHub. Already have an account? Sign in to comment
Labels
None yet
Projects
None yet
Development

No branches or pull requests

2 participants