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Signal or Telegram or WhatsApp or Parler or may be Tooter?

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WhatsApp, which uses Signal’s encryption technology, laid out fresh terms of reference on Wednesday, 2021 asking all its users to agree to let its owner Facebook Inc., and its subsidiaries collect user data, including their phone number and location. Citizens have not taken this aspect lightly and there is global furor to leave WhatsApp worldwide and switch over to new messaging application and they do not want to give their user location and chat information.

After President Trump was permanently banned from Twitter and Facebook, another bag news came and the Big Technology Oligarchs turned their attention to Parler, the up and coming free speech alternative to Twitter. In what can only be deemed a “coordinated attack” Google, Apple and Amazon took down Parler so it could not fill the void for the Conservative users of social media being developed by John Matze. Apple notified Parler of its decision in a message that said it had violated the company’s app store terms. “The processes Parler has put in place to moderate or prevent the spread of dangerous and illegal content have proved insufficient,” Apple told Parler. Parler had fewer than 1 million users until early 2020. In the last week of June 2020, it was estimated that the Parler app had more than 1.5 million daily users. As of July 15, 2020, Parler had 2.8 million total users and had been downloaded 2.5 million times, nearly half of which were in June.

After being permanently banned by twitter, Donald Trump may switch to Parler and all his supporters may shift. Major social media giants have banned President Trump from posting any of his messages like on Spotify, Snapchat and others. It is rumoured that Parler was used to plan the January 6th attack.

Signal and Telegram messaging applications are seeing a sudden increase in download demand after its larger rival WhatsApp’s updated terms of service raised eyebrows on the social media. Some privacy activists questioned the “accept our data grab or get out” move on Twitter, Instagram and other social media platforms and suggested users to switch to apps like Signal and Telegram immediately. Signal’s popularity shot up further on Thursday after it was endorsed by Elon Musk, who is the owner of Tesla and SpaceX, the richest man on the globe and one who has the most – followed accounts on Twitter, and by the micro blogging site’s top boss Jack Dorsey. Until now Telegram used to be the preferred medium for chat, since the communication was fully encrypted and used by global terrorist organisations.

More than 100,000 users installed Signal across the app stores of Apple and Google in the last two days, while Telegram picked up nearly 2.2 million downloads, according to data analytics firm Sensor Tower. Telegram will make some users pay for certain additional features next year. New installs of WhatsApp fell 11% in the first seven days of the year 2021, compared with the prior week, but that still amounted to an estimated 10.5 million downloads globally, Sensor Tower said. Signal is truly End to End Encryption. Even the metadata is encrypted. Even servers do not have access to the membership list, group title, or the group icon. Signal App & WhatsApp both use the Signal protocol for Encryption (its code was published on the Internet by Twitter in the year 2011). Unlike WhatsApp, the Signal App is entirely based on Open Source Standards and is being developed by the open source Community. It’s clear that if Apple, Google, Amazon, Facebook and Twitter collude against any Government or person, they can gag their free speech and global communication reach. The banning of Potus by Twitter on social media is a great case study of the digital gag order. The twitter is a leftist lobby and Meghan and Harry have excused themselves from all social media presence as of now.

Looking for an alternative to WhatsApp, I have tried using Signal, Namaste Bharat and Telegram and found Telegram to be the best. Without going into the analysis present in the domain, the most important on ground advantage I found is that in a poor (not zero network), I tried using all the three and Telegram was way way ahead in speed and reliability. Other advantage is that when we add a new member in a group he gets to see all the previous messages / pictures / videos in the group. Another is that we can have up to 200,000 members in a single group which is unheard of. One can attach files of up to 1.5 GB which is again extremely generous. The application is developed by Russians.

Everyone knows that the GAFA (Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon) group is a dangerous entity, unless the scope of Google spying has changed drastically, Google has been openly reading our emails for a long time. Sadly there is nothing new here! I guess Facebook is now openly telling us and we should thank them for being honest what they have been doing in secret for a long time.

Signal App & WhatsApp both use the Signal protocol for Encryption (its code was published on the Internet by Twitter in the year 2011). It’s probably not really reading in detail as much as scanning to match advertisements. If we really want privacy, it’s probably best not to use an absolutely free service. This is probably not reading emails like in Russia or China or North Korea or even in Pakistan to see if you are saying something against the Government or the Communist Party. New GAFA group (like the east India company?) is pandering, compiling and stealing our likes and dislike. They are reading our likes and dislikes and Facebook after analysing them, used to create a social profile of the individuals. Yes, they are not reading individual email but as a whole they understand the contents and thus the target advertising. Each advertiser provides a bunch of keywords and they search for those keywords in the email, Facebook postings, and WhatsApp and so on. They then match advertisers to users. The issue is around building a profile of each person based on the pattern of use and then manipulate them. Cambridge Analytics showed how easy it is to profile people and it changed the voting patterns of many US citizens in the 2016 election.

I suggest all of you download telegram, have a one on one chat with someone sitting next to you. Make a group of two do a chat add the third and see for yourself.

Modi Government must take heed from the recent debacle in the US political arena where the media giants can censor the sitting President of the country on false pretexts. It’s a case where they are the judge and jury as well as the executioner too. It’s high time that India should embark upon building its own information infrastructure as the Chinese did decades ago; where they have their own Google, YouTube, WhatsApp, Facebook and Amazon equivalents and their own communication satellites ring. They do not depend on GAFA and are independent of it.

Just imagine come 2024 and Modi is blocked on the Main Stream Media as well as Social media platforms. If they can do to someone with 88.7 million followers on Twitter, it can be anyone. Modi is the highest followed political leader in the world and is a right wing leader as Potus and the leftist cabal can go to any extent to prevent him canvassing full steam.

Google, Facebook and Twitter are hyper scale monopolies by definition. They own virtually 95 percent of the social media market and 90 percent of the mobile phone OS market and so control 95 percent of the App market. As an information and social network services cartel, they clearly engage in censorship for the political purposes and can censor 95 percent of the population that uses a phone or computer for accessing information. Freedom of the world’s citizens ability to communicate is under attack at the hands of the globalists as of today in such global disorder, where facts are suppressed and fake narrative is churned out as it happened today in Karnal, Haryana. A rally was planned and agitating farmers damaged the rally site and protestors did not allow the chopper to land. Main stream media India Today reported that rally was cancelled and farmers were hurt and tear gas shells were fired on peaceful and poor farmers.

Modi ji, beware, you are the next target of the left-liberal-globalist agenda. The time to act is now.

Rajiv Saxena
Rajiv Saxena
Rajiv Prakash Saxena is a graduate of UBC, Vancouver, Canada. He is an authority on eCommerce, eProcurement, eSign, DSCs and Internet Security. He has been a Technology Bureaucrat and Thought leader in the Government. He has 8 books and few UN assignments. He wrote IT Policies of Colombia and has implemented projects in Jordan, Rwanda, Nepal and Mauritius. Rajiv writes, speaks, mentors on technology issues in Express Computers, ET, National frontier and TV debates. He worked and guided the following divisions: Computer Aided Design (CAD), UP: MP: Maharashtra and Haryana State Coordinator to setup NICNET in their respective Districts of the State, TradeNIC, wherein a CD containing list of 1,00,000 exporters was cut with a search engine and distributed to all Indian Embassies and High Commissions way back in the year 1997 (It was an initiative between NIC and MEA Trade Division headed by Ms. Sujatha Singh, IFS, India’s Ex Foreign Secretary), Law Commission, Ministry of Law & Justice, Department of Legal Affairs, Department of Justice, Ministry of Urban Development (MoUD), Ministry of Housing & Urban Poverty Alleviation (MoHUPA), National Jail Project, National Human Rights Commission (NHRC), National Commission for Minorities (NCM), National Data Centres (NDC), NIC National Infrastructure, Certifying Authority (CA) to issue Digital Signature Certificates (DSCs), eProcurement, Ministry of Parliamentary Affairs (MPA), Lok Sabha and its Secretariat (LSS) and Rajya Sabha and its Secretariat (RSS) along with their subordinate and attached offices like Directorate of Estate (DoE), Land & Development Office (L&DO), National Building Construction Corporation (NBCC), Central Public Works Department (CPWD), National Capital Regional Planning Board (NCRPB), Housing & Urban Development Corporation (HUDO), National Building Organisation (NBO), Delhi Development Authority (DDA), BMPTC and many others.

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