Why these terms matter

Privacy marketing leans on vocabulary that sounds precise and often is not. “End-to-end encrypted” means something exact, and an app can satisfy it while still recording who you talked to and when. “Serverless” means the opposite of what a cloud engineer means by it. “Anonymous” is used for apps that are merely pseudonymous.

The definitions below are the ones PrivaMesh is built on, written in plain English with the trade-offs left in. Each links to the primary specification where one exists, so you can check the claim at the source rather than taking a marketing page’s word for it - including ours.

If you read only two, make them metadata and forward secrecy. Between them they explain most of the distance between an app that encrypts your messages and an app that actually protects your privacy.