Does the service allow you to permanently delete your personal data?
Yes, by contacting someone
“For more information about these rights, please see the guidance provided by the ICO. If you have any questions or are unsure how to exercise your rights, please contact us at dpo@element.io.”
Find the mistake.
At first glance, it is better, after a detailed analysis is not.
Do you want to show us your detailed analysis? I hope you are not referring to the erroneous ToS analysis, which in addition is only one of many aspects relevant for the evaluation of your options. I stick to:
Signal not being perfect does not diminish Telegrams flaws and does not make the lack of end-to-end-encryption acceptable, respectively the difference very small.
I read the review and I did not find any mistake. The privacy policy does not say how to express the right of erasure as required by art. 17 of GDPR.
At the moment, data request (deletion is missing) is done manually as wrote below to your quote.
“If you are a user of the Element chat app you can request a copy of your data by emailing dpo@element.io. We are working on a solution which will allow you to download the data automatically.”
However, if you think that there is a mistake in this or other review, please open an issue on github project page.
Do you want to show us your detailed analysis? I hope you are not referring to the erroneous ToS analysis, which in addition is only one of many aspects relevant for the evaluation of your options. I stick to:
Again, I repeat that at first glance signal appears to be superior to telegram in terms of trust required. However, after a detailed analysis (the devil is into details) available here and here you will find that the difference is not so big. Please read it properly, not as you have read ToS and privacy policy reviews :).
To be clear, I am not here to convince you, I am just reporting evidence based on facts. Personally, I really like element/matrix since it is supports federation, however, according to it it ToS and privacy policy it requires more trust than other. The great advantage is that you can self-host your server (not on AWS as element) and remove and trust from any third party. In the future, it would support p2p.
Having in mind that Telegram is not an open source service, it’s hard to say it’s secure. I see that arguments I would write to proof my words have been already written so don’t want to duplicate them.
Also, people have pointed out that Signal is also suspicious, and have given proofs - I can only agree.
My choice of secure and easy to use technology is Xmpp and Matrix. There are of course more than these two, I just mention them because I trust and use them daily.
For Android, Conversations and Blabber (Conversations fork) are very user-friendly nowadays. Definitely worth trying and switching to one of those.
IT expert Mike Kuketz has done a pretty solid breakdown of a few messengers. According to this, Telegram is not recommended. His messenger matrix can be viewed in English and German. However, detailed information is only available in German on his blog. (Maybe the online translation will help one or the other: DeepL Translate: The world's most accurate translator)
I’d like to use XMPP more. This is mainly because i don’t like large companies (apple, facebook, google) spending lots of money bankrolling products which cost billions to run. On the one hand, it’s good that people without much money have access to a supported messaging infrastructure, on the other hand it’s very difficult for small companies to compete.
XMPP seems to have found a good middle way. You can have a free account on a server or you can support the person operating the server through their patreon/paypal/whatever. You could say that it’s more difficult to set up XMPP, because you need to create an account AND download and configure a client. I would say that that’s easy compared with transferring WhatsApp chat history between two devices.
When it comes to commercial chat software I tend towards google chat. The message history is centralized (and has been for 15 years) so you have no trouble migrating between devices. For the normal user this is a huge bonus. Also it can be used in the browser without proxying through a smartphone (Threema once drained my phone battery completely in 2 hours when i was using the web client).