Element is better than -

WhatsApp (and Facebook Messenger)

• It’s owned by Meta (Facebook) - you can read more about what Meta is like here
• While the conversations content should be encrypted, Meta definitely accesses your metadata and contacts
  • Metadata like who you communicate with, how often, from which devices, IP addresses… are also highly sensitive personal data
  • If the app isn’t open source it’s impossible to verify that the provider doesn’t have access to your conversations despite the end-to-end encryption. Information exists that the conversations are monitored anyway (see below).
• You can’t use the app without accessing your phone contacts - Meta enforces access to your current contact list
• Facebook’s takeover of WhatsApp is a sad story culminating in the WA founder’s recommendation to “Delete Facebook” and his support to Signal as a rival platform

Telegram

• It isn’t better than WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger in principle - it’s a closed centralized platform
• Conversations aren’t encrypted by default thus Telegram can access them
• Its scope is too wide, it overwhelms with unnecessary features thus it’s hard to navigate the settings and keep track of the important ones
• It requires a phone number

Signal

• Privacy/security goes too much at the expense of usability here (for our purposes)
  • For me the main problem is the inability to sync more than 2 devices (and even that didn’t work well)
    • The fact that Element stores conversations on server is not a problem for me as long as the data is securely encrypted and the server operator cannot access it