Right but you could at least be reasonably sure it wouldn’t be outright spied on from the person you’re sending it to. Now it’s almost a guarantee.

Like if I sent something to a friend of mine, I could be fairly certain it wouldn’t end up in the wrong hands unless they got compromised or did something stupid. I could trust their competence.

Now everyone that isn’t actively managing their own windows installation is absolutely compromised, as a rule. Like I can’t just send an email to my mom anymore, from now on its always my Mom and Copilot.

Yes, and that’s a valid concern, but there’s no good answer here. That’s why it’s such a problem. From now on, one of the most widely used operating systems in the world is going to be harvesting data from any and everything that appears on it. Meaning any software you use to send any form of electronic communication, if a Windows computer opens it, and the user either hasn’t bothered or doesn’t know how to disable recall, your information has been harvested by Microsoft.

There’s just no way to limit or avoid this. We need regulation.

Secure from what exactly? You need to have a threat model here.

Which is funny, because developers use “secure” like this all the time as a way of scaring users into compliance for any changes they implement. If they voiced aloud what the actual threat was, they’d have to admit that often its the user’s freedom they’re afraid of. The user may do something stupid, therefore their ability to do it is dangerous for everyone.

They’d remove the front door on your home and call it more secure, all because some people don’t lock it.

There aren’t any good search engines anymore, because there isn’t a good internet anymore. SOE has buried the internet’s wealth of information and centralization starved out all the spaces where information used to be. Hell half the forums that used to appear in search results aren’t even online anymore, and live only in the way back machine (which doesn’t come up in results).

There’s so little to find anymore compared to the halcyon days of search engines we remember.

It’s mostly that it’s just an older site and the voting/review system goes back by over a decade. Much of the information you’re gonna get on there is just dated, pure and simple, and that reflects in the rankings.

And as you said, the categories aren’t curated well enough. Too many unrelated suggestions.

Only issue with alternativeto is the comments and reviews are all dated, some by over 10 years, and often don’t reflect the current state of the software.

A lot of the information on the site just feels very stale in general.

Having third party clients is not good for security.

If the first party provider told you this, you should always second guess them.

Moreover, providing an option that informed users can choose doesn’t hurt security. This idea the user can’t be trusted to use the appropriate type of messaging if provided options needs to die.

You have absolutely zero guarantees, with or without their policy on third party apps. You can not send sensitive information to someone else’s phone and tell yourself it couldn’t possibly have been intercepted, or that someone couldn’t get ahold of that phone, or that the person you’re sending it to won’t take a screenshot and save it to their cloud.

A lot of software nowadays is doing a real disservice to their users by continuing to lie to them like this by selling them the notion that they can control their information after it has been sent. It’s really making people forget basic information hygiene. No app can guarantee that message won’t be intercepted or mishandled. They can only give you tools to hopefully prevent that, but there are no guarantees.

Moreover, this policy does not exclude them from including third-party functionality and warning the user when they are communicating with somebody that isn’t using encryption.

Too many of these apps and services are getting away with the “security” excuse for what is effectively just creating a walled garden to lock users in. Ask yourself how you can get your own data out of these services when you decide to quit them, and it becomes more apparent what they’re doing.

That just feels like shooting themselves in the foot. Just inform the user SMS isn’t secure. That’s it.

Not being willing to trust the user with the information so they can make a choice is asinine. It’s the same reason why I stopped using Tuta. Complete privacy and security are great but if there’s no option to make things a little more open for the sake of convenience or interconnectivity, I’m just not interested.

Security and privacy shouldn’t be a prison.