Translated from German (with DeepL):
The Swiss messenger service Threema is being acquired by the German investment company Comitis Capital. Both the company and Threema itself emphasize that the arrival of the new investor will not lead to any significant changes for the time being. The company headquarters and servers will remain in Switzerland, and the management team will stay unchanged.
A financial investor with a broad portfolio
Comitis Capital is a young private equity firm, not a technology company. It invests in various industries, including a UK-based supplier of vegan meat alternatives and a manufacturer of dog accessories.
Its business model consists of providing financial support to promising companies so that they can grow and establish themselves internationally. “Comitis now clearly sees this potential in Threema too,” says SRF digital editor Tanja Eder.
Data protection as a business model
The strong focus on data protection is considered a key strength of the messenger. Precisely because US tech companies are coming under increasing criticism and digital sovereignty is gaining in importance, Comitis sees this aspect as a clear unique selling point.
Whether this will remain the case in the long term is unclear, according to Eder. If Comitis were to conclude at some point that it would be more profitable to collect Threema customer data or sell the company, no one could prevent them from doing so.
Trust in the authorities remains an issue
In Switzerland, federal authorities and the military also use Threema for internal communication. Even though everyone involved is aware that there is no such thing as absolute security, Threema still has advantages over its competitors.
For example, Threema’s source code is openly accessible. Experts in the fields of data protection, IT security, and research regularly check whether the company is keeping its promises. Government agencies can also carry out their own checks.
Hardly any alternatives on the market
Good alternatives to Threema are rare. “Apart from WhatsApp, which dominates the market, there is simply not much room for other messenger services,” notes the digital editor.
Signal is considered another secure messenger alongside Threema. However, it is operated from the US, albeit by a non-profit foundation and financed by donations. In Switzerland, Proton offers encrypted emails, but does not have its own messenger service.
“Given this limited offering, we can only hope that privacy-friendly communication services will gain in importance in the future,” says Eder.
With Proton, we shouldn’t depend on their ecosystem. Diversify the products. Honestly, I think they’ll end up shitty like Google.
“Companies” are a fundamentally fucked way to organize the economy.
Anything good a company does can be destroyed almost completely when someone buys them. We need to make structures that are fundamentally, legally resistant to this kinda thing.
Good alternatives to Threema are rare. “Apart from WhatsApp, which dominates the market, there is simply not much room for other messenger services,” notes the digital editor.
What a bunch of marketing bullshit. If at all there is an abundance of good alternatives.
The perfect messenger would be open and private.
That means open source, federated with portable account’s, e2e encrypted, minimal metadata storage, discoverable contacts, easy to self host as compute, storage and knowledge.
That doesn’t exist as of today. Also it’s really hard.
Pretty much everything is better than WhatsApp though.
Cursive was added later or modified to clarify.
SimpleX doesn’t even have an account to move anywhere…
Any number of Matrix-based messengers fulfill most of those criteria; meta data reduction could be better but we’re getting there.
Also Signal is very decent alternative if you want a WhatsApp-like UX from a trustworthy source.
This reporting seems quite one-sided.
I know that a lot oft options are close and make different trade offs. But as you said yourself. The fulfill most criteria not all.
No reason to let the perfect be the enemy of the good though. As you said, pretty much anything is better than WhatsApp
Deltachat, Matrix, and Session are federated and E2E encrypted, I think.
At least matrix doesn’t let you move your account to other server. Also it doesn’t minimize metadata storage. Its is stored on every server for a room.
The other two I don’t know. I’ll look them.up.
This is the point where you both turn to eachother and say XMPP! at the same time, right?
Good means private. In terms of private there is Threema, Signal, and various self-hosted options that only freaks would actually use.
Deltachat is really good, decentralized and basically unblockable (unless the government blocks the email protocol… which would break the internet)
Deltachat can’t be considered as private as Signal, SimpleX, Briar, Threema or Cwtch due to the fact that it’s based on the mail protocol. The mail protocol will always leak metadata (who, to whom, where and when) because it could’t function otherwise. And because we live in a world of surveillence, metadata can be oftentimes more valuable than the message itself.
Also saying that deltachat is unblockable because it is based on the mail protocol would be the same as saying that every app utilizing VOIP is unblockable because it uses the TCP/IP stack and blocking it would render the internet unusuable.
The metadata-issue is addressed in their FAQ
And to the blocking issue:
There are significant benefits to using email as transport in a hostile network environment. As mentioned above, it is infeasible to block email protocols across a network, because everyone relies on email for everything. Since there’s no way to differentiate Delta Chat messages from emails on a network, Delta Chat protocols can’t be blocked without blocking all email. Individual Delta Chat servers can be blocked, but the protocol cannot be blocked network-wide.
Unlike most other messengers, Delta Chat apps do not store any metadata about contacts or groups on servers, also not in encrypted form. Instead, all group metadata is end-to-end encrypted and stored on end-user devices, only. Servers can therefore only see:
- the sender and receiver addresses and
- the message size.
By default, the addresses are randomly generated. All other message, contact and group metadata resides in the end-to-end encrypted part of messages.
https://delta.chat/en/help#message-metadata
> Doesn’t store any metadata on servers
> Servers still see the sender and reciever and the message size
Explain how this is not contradictory.
Furthermore my original argument on protocol blocking still stands (if almost all communication platforms rely on a widely used protocol, the blocking of which is infeasble, then how is this a feature noone else besides deltachat has).
And as the FAQ brilliantly illustrates, you don’t have to block the mail protocol to inhibit deltachat users from communicating. All you have to do, is just shut down the relays which are crucial to masking your metadata.
Speaking of relays, all they do is transfer the trust. Without using relays you have to trust that normal mail servers wont’t log your activity (they do). With relays you have to trust that the relay operators won’t log your activity.
Delta chat is what I moved to from XMPP after NPM-7.
The statement is in regard to the market dominance. You’ve misread it.
Then it is still not true. Signal has over 11 million users in Germany, Threema has 8-10 million users.
Yes, I know WhatsApp is biggest overall. But for Threema to say that the competition is WhatsApp and that’s it… Is a wrong market analysis imo. In the “privacy conscious” segment signal is the biggest. Threema’s biggest competitor in Germany is Signal, not WhatsApp.
threema balls
