this post was submitted on 26 Mar 2025
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Privacy
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Matrix shares metadata in plaintext with every participating server: who talks to who, when and how often.
https://spec.matrix.org/latest/#room-structure
The content of the messages can be encrypted. Who is in a room and who sent each message is not. See the “shared data” section of the chart.
Encrypting that data would require something like Sealed Sender (like Signal), and that is entirely absent from the spec and any implementation.
Edit: to the people downvoting, this is the literal Matrix spec upon which all the implementations rely. You are asking me to prove the absence of something in it. If you could, point me to the section that comments on the encryption of metadata in the spec. You may not like the answer (I’d love for it to encrypt metadata too!) but that doesn’t change the fact that it doesn’t encrypt metadata at this time.
yeah, no shit, it's decentralized.
If you don't want that metadata visible then host your own server and require your organization to use only that server, there are settings specifically to enforce this use-case.
the french government uses matrix for communications, it's fine.
However, unlike Signal, you can exclude external participating servers entirely.
(I heavily prefer XMPP to Matrix tho, even though I host both)