this post was submitted on 07 Feb 2024
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The Signal messenger and protocol.
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Location showing only goes against privacy If it’s not done right.
It’s expensive to encrypt it and forward it through the servers or proxies, but revealing if done peer to peer. (And less reliable)
But by the time I’m giving “live location” I don’t think my ip address is THAT private 😝
How is location expensive to encrypt? I share my location all the time but to do that I have to write an entire sentence to other people where I am. Just introduce a new message type (like with edits) frontend to enable location sharing. Location is sent every 5min or if the other person requests an update, than location is updated again (send location update request message to trigger response on the other side). Same encryption as everything else and easy to implement. Of course the devil is in the detail but the basis are trivial.
The "hardest" part would be to show the location on a map without leaking data but just add a warning dialog and open externally. Every link in Signal you press has the same privacy issues.
Encryption isn’t hard, the service to stream live data over an hour is what costs money.
Continuous data
See my comment here for the amount of data it would take to share updates for 24 hours, it's almost nothing:
https://lemmy.ml/comment/8085552