He/him. Chinese born, Canadian citizen. University student studying environmental science, hobbyist programmer. Marxist-Leninist.
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I love how their entire argument is that they don’t trust the author of this extension. Meanwhile, it’s open source and the codebase is small. Also, Firefox tells you the permissions it uses, which in reality means the extension specifically requests those permissions and has access to nothing it doesn’t list, so unless you also don’t trust Firefox, what’s the problem?
How else are they going to track you?
No, seriously. Even if the messages are encrypted, the metadata including your account info and the account info of everyone you talk to are not. In a lot of these cases, they don’t have to have the actual contents of the messages to have a pretty clear picture of what you might be talking about!
With a phone number that’s almost certainly registered to your real identity, it makes it trivial to track what you as a person is doing even without breaking the encryption! An encrypted messenger that requires anything related to your real identity to get an account is security theatre.
For example: if you suddenly start messaging back and fourth with an account, and that account happens to have the same phone number as the one on the business card and website of an out of state abortion clinic worker, and your own phone number’s area code just so happens to fall in a state that banned abortions after Roe v Wade got trashed, it juuuust might imply a few things about you. They can’t definitively prove what the messages were, but if your state criminalizes any and all attempts to get an abortion anywhere, it’s probably enough to get a warrant against you.
Non ten-exponent numbers is way more common than you think.
In India, you get the lakh (hundred thousand or 1,00,000), and the crore (ten million or 1,00,00,000), and so on.
In Chinese, you have one, ten, hundred, thousand. Then wan (ten thousand), ten wan (hundred thousand), hundred wan (million), thousand wan (ten million). Then, you don’t get wan wan (hundred million), you get a new word, yi, then ten yi, hundred yi, so on until you get another new word for yi yi, and so on. Basically, the system is that you can multiply any magnitude word by any magnitude word smaller than it, but once you get to what would have been the magnitude word multiplied by itself, it’s time for a new word. Actually a pretty cool system, coming from a Chinese speaker, but it means it takes me a minute to translate between Chinese and English numbers.