Translated from German (with DeepL):
The Swiss messenger service Threema is being acquired by the German investment company Comitis Capital. Both the company and Threema itself emphasize that the arrival of the new investor will not lead to any significant changes for the time being. The company headquarters and servers will remain in Switzerland, and the management team will stay unchanged.
A financial investor with a broad portfolio
Comitis Capital is a young private equity firm, not a technology company. It invests in various industries, including a UK-based supplier of vegan meat alternatives and a manufacturer of dog accessories.
Its business model consists of providing financial support to promising companies so that they can grow and establish themselves internationally. “Comitis now clearly sees this potential in Threema too,” says SRF digital editor Tanja Eder.
Data protection as a business model
The strong focus on data protection is considered a key strength of the messenger. Precisely because US tech companies are coming under increasing criticism and digital sovereignty is gaining in importance, Comitis sees this aspect as a clear unique selling point.
Whether this will remain the case in the long term is unclear, according to Eder. If Comitis were to conclude at some point that it would be more profitable to collect Threema customer data or sell the company, no one could prevent them from doing so.
Trust in the authorities remains an issue
In Switzerland, federal authorities and the military also use Threema for internal communication. Even though everyone involved is aware that there is no such thing as absolute security, Threema still has advantages over its competitors.
For example, Threema’s source code is openly accessible. Experts in the fields of data protection, IT security, and research regularly check whether the company is keeping its promises. Government agencies can also carry out their own checks.
Hardly any alternatives on the market
Good alternatives to Threema are rare. “Apart from WhatsApp, which dominates the market, there is simply not much room for other messenger services,” notes the digital editor.
Signal is considered another secure messenger alongside Threema. However, it is operated from the US, albeit by a non-profit foundation and financed by donations. In Switzerland, Proton offers encrypted emails, but does not have its own messenger service.
“Given this limited offering, we can only hope that privacy-friendly communication services will gain in importance in the future,” says Eder.
For me the old element was always buggy but Element X is pretty dope. The protocol has also been audited multiple times and improved quite a bit over the last 5 years. Its not hard to start for others if you just give them one instance you recommend. When it comes to CP I personally don’t know of the issue but I’m not in a lot of spaces. I like that it has voice and video calls tho.
X was worse for me last time I used it, which was admittedly a while back, but still. They might not be able to read message content but any server that federates with matrix.org leaks a fuck ton of metadata to them and people have been killed for metadata before. If Mossad is monitoring that metadata then that’s enough for me. It’s hard enough, I have people asking me about second passwords and all that. This is the type of people that use one password for everything and it’s hunter2, I love them but they aren’t all America’s Best. Delta Chat is spotty on the video/audio calls, but they’re working on it, and somehow they ring through on my phone where (due to my setting pull notifications polling every 300sec because GrapheneOS) on Element they wouldn’t notify me until too late.