It&#x27;s great that there is such a strong interest in secure communication, but all of the solutions that keep getting placed in the limelight in recent years are either centralised or exclusively available for use with a smartphone (because of the phone number requirement), often both!<p>I&#x27;m sure that these solutions are a lot more secure than completely unprotected alternatives, but am I wrong in assuming that if you want secure and private communications, the following principles must be met <i>at the least?</i><p>* The protocol used must be open, standardized and implementable by others<p>* Widely endorsed by cryptography experts<p>* An implementation must be available and developed as free and open source software<p>* End-to-end encryption is used for the contents of the conversations, private keys do not leave the user&#x27;s computing device<p>* The protocol must not have any technological barriers that prevent an implementation from working on any modern operating system (i.e., a phone number is not required)<p>* The protocol must allow for a complete communications network (clients and servers) to be implemented without the need for centralised third-party services<p>(The last point probably implies federation.)<p>For e-mail, OpenPGP meets these requirements. For chat, XMPP has Off-The-Record messaging.<p>Some of the above points are hostile towards any party that creates secure communications tools with the intent of growing a large user base for economic purposes. Call me a sceptic, but this is probably why use of these protocols and principals is limited to security experts and software developers who understand these principles — for anyone betting on creating the next WhatsApp in one of the mobile walled gardens embracing the whole list means risking losing your potential advertising eyeballs to alternatives.<p>Of course, there is also the matter of infrastructure. A lot of people expect to be able to use these tools for free, but that implies that someone is paying for the hosting of (relay) servers.