OUT OF DATE – FOR ARCHIVAL PURPOSES ONLY. This is version 1.0 of our scorecard; it is out of date, and is preserved here for purely historical reasons. Please visit Surveillance Self-Defense if you’re looking for recommendations on specific tools to use to ensure your privacy and security while we work on writing an updated guide to secure messaging. Again, you should not use this scorecard to evaluate the security of any of the listed tools, as many of them have been changed since the scorecard was last updated (some for the better, some for the worse). Which apps and tools actually keep your messages safe?In the face of widespread Internet surveillance, we need a secure and practical means of talking to each other from our phones and computers. Many companies offer “secure messaging” products—but are these systems actually secure? We decided to find out, in the first phase of a new EFF Campaign for Secure & Usable Crypto.This scorecard represents only the first phase of the campaign. In later phases, we are planning to offer closer examinations of the usability and security of the tools that score the highest here. As such, the results in the scorecard below should not be read as endorsements of individual tools or guarantees of their security; they are merely indications that the projects are on the right track. For practical advice and tutorials on how to protect your online communication against surveillance, check out EFF’s Surveillance Self-Defense guide.
