Are video conferences or text messages safe?

It depends on what you mean by safe. With the start of Covid-19 and the ubiquitous video conferencing, there were many funny stories of unintended visitors playing pranks on serious web conferences. This is largely not a problem since all conferencing software now has passwords and control functions for the web conference host. There still remains an underlying problem that isn’t obvious.

All free services analyze everything said or typed to gather information to target ads to you. Every free service: Zoom, Gmail, and Facebook among others. You should treat video conferences as if you were having the conversation in a coffee shop while a person with a notepad is listening and writing down keywords of items you might want to purchase. That’s actually what’s happening. There’s a painting by my favorite surrealist painter Joel Rea that explains how these services see the customer.

As for law enforcement, they can force you to open your phone and view any chats. Even more invasive are the intelligence services which actively record all internet activity. Don’t do anything illegal online, even the pros eventually get caught.

What can one do then if one needs to tell someone else a password or bank account information?

There are a few ways to do things safely.

Video Conferencing Safely

The best solution for video conferencing is Apple’s Facetime. Apple has a long-standing history of protecting user’s privacy and Facetime is no exception. Facetime uses end to end encryption which means no one except you and the other person can tell what’s being said or shown. You paid for the device; you get good privacy.

I know there’s a problem there. You can’t have a web conference with multiple people and expect everyone to have an iPhone. Unless your company has its own conferencing server, and it’s carefully set up, your video conference cannot be private.

There is a little trick to avoid the snooping in free video conferencing software. Video conferences are analyzed for audio clues only ( so far ), and it’s looking for full words. So, verbally telling someone a password isn’t likely to be picked up by the advertising keyword filters. Also, you could write the password on a piece of paper and show it to the camera for a few seconds.

Messaging Safely

There is actually a free messaging service that is private, WhatsApp. It uses end to end encryption just like Apple’s Facetime. This has made it hated by most dictatorial countries, and it is banned in China, Iran, Syria, North Korea, and Cuba. Even law enforcement can’t access it without getting into your phone physically. They also provide a calling feature for voice calls. Feel comfortable sending someone else a password on WhatsApp.

There are other free messaging apps that claim to delete messages like Wickr, Kik, or Signal, but they don’t say they don’t mine data for ad purposes.

So after all that discussion, the best options are: