Message metadata - such as sender, recipient, device ID, and timestamps - is not encrypted at the transport layer, and in many cases remains visible to the homeserver
Wire wrote that article in summer last year to prevent the German IT-Planning Council from adopting Matrix as the communications layer for its consolidated interfederal government-to-citizen messaging infrastructure in the public administration.
So be aware that, to my knowledge, this article is not a good-faith tech blog post but part of public affairs campaign / lobbying attempt.
Would be neat to have meta data encrypted in Matrix, but it’s not a deal breaker for most use cases imo.
Agreed, but metadata not being encrypted remains a fact. Sure, metadata of a single message might not mean much, but when combined with metadata of many messages from many users you can find out a lot about a person and their habits. Especially when cross-referencing with other data sources (social media of other users, phone location, etc.).
Thank you very much for these links. I really like the ideas Matrix + Element, and I think they have the best shot of making something very usable. Hopefully this gets implemented one day and I can actually make the switch!
Please explain. They don’t have that?
https://wire.com/en/blog/matrix-not-safe-eu-data-privacy
Wire wrote that article in summer last year to prevent the German IT-Planning Council from adopting Matrix as the communications layer for its consolidated interfederal government-to-citizen messaging infrastructure in the public administration.
So be aware that, to my knowledge, this article is not a good-faith tech blog post but part of public affairs campaign / lobbying attempt.
Would be neat to have meta data encrypted in Matrix, but it’s not a deal breaker for most use cases imo.
Agreed, but metadata not being encrypted remains a fact. Sure, metadata of a single message might not mean much, but when combined with metadata of many messages from many users you can find out a lot about a person and their habits. Especially when cross-referencing with other data sources (social media of other users, phone location, etc.).
https://youtube.com/watch?v=tL8_caB35Pg
Absolutely, it’s definitely one of the major areas work on the Matrix standard is needed.
There is an MSC (= a spec change proposal) from September 2025 where the folks at Element proposed a solution for how to do this going forward: https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-spec-proposals/pull/3414?ref=element.io
This blog article explains it more clearly: https://element.io/blog/hiding-room-metadata-from-servers/
Thank you very much for these links. I really like the ideas Matrix + Element, and I think they have the best shot of making something very usable. Hopefully this gets implemented one day and I can actually make the switch!
Edit: While clicking around I came across this: https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-rust-sdk/issues/5397#issuecomment-3714128184
Does this mean it should be already implemented or am I reading it wrong?