Wire is now owned by a US-based holding company, delisted from PrivacyTools
For those of you that prefer to use secure communication methods with full confidence in their privacy, this news is important: Secure messaging service Wire has announced that it is now owned by a US-based holding company, with its latest series of funding coming from an investor with a portfolio of data-intensive companies.
Following Wire's official announcement of the change of holding company to a United States-based business entity, as well as the fact that Wire has accepted $8 million in venture capital funding from investors including Morpheus Ventures, PrivacyTools.io has removed Wire from its list of secure software.
In PrivacyTools' post explaining the decision, ThinkPrivacy creator Dan Arel cited multiple points:
One of the major investors in Wire's latest $8 million funding push is Morpheus Ventures, which owns companies in industries like healthcare, life insurance, retail customer data analytics, and voice AI. All of these industries notoriously use privacy-invading data collection methods in order to ensure profitability without levying additional costs on to consumers directly.
Crucially, Wire has also updated its privacy policy within the past couple of years, changing verbiage from only sharing user data when "required by law" to the much more vague "if necessary..." This essentially gives Wire a tool to justify whatever action it takes with your user data. This policy change was not disclosed to users. Additionally, as has already been established, Wire stores unencrypted metadata (including a list of everyone you've ever contacting using the service) in plaintext.
Though PrivacyTools has removed Wire from its recommendations, that does not necessarily mean that it's unsafe, as Arel himself stated. That said, the PrivacyTools team has lost faith in standing behind the integrity of Wire's promise of secure messaging, and that itself is a big statement.
In the meantime, PrivacyTools itself lists real-time communication software and services that it still stands behind. This includes Signal for a more traditional instant messaging approach as well as Linphone for voice and video calling. Both services support end-to-end encryption and are fully open source.
Related news
Wire on AlternativeTo
- Free Personal • Open Source
- Mac
- Windows
- Linux
- Online
- Android
- iPhone
- Android Tablet
- iPad
- Self-Hosted
- F-Droid
- Software as a Service (SaaS)
Wire is the most secure collaboration platform featuring messenger, voice, video, conference calls, file-sharing, and external collaboration –all protected by the most secure end-to-end-encryption.