Matrix Metadata Problem: the server sees everything except your messages

People pick Matrix because of end-to-end encryption. But E2EE only protects message content — everything around it is plaintext.

The server sees:

  • Your ID, IP, client type and version, device you use
  • Your presence, typing status, read receipts
  • Which rooms you join and when you join/leave
  • Who else is in those rooms → your entire social graph
  • Room names, topics, avatars (all plaintext state)
  • For every message: who sent it, which room, a millisecond timestamp, type, size

And federation copies most of that to every other server whose users are in the room. Your “social footprint” isn’t one copy — it’s as many as there are servers.

  • ghost_laptop@lemmy.ml
    4·
    9 days ago

    while i think it’d be nice if those things weren’t seen it’s not that much, specially if you don’t use any real life connection to your user (you’d need to hide your ip i guess). i mean, you can’t go to jail for any of those things. if you want even more privacy you can stop federating. i wonder how much of this is because of synapse and if the other servers would do better. they come with tradeoffs, though, synapse is the only one that supports self destructing messages for example afaik.