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!
Looks like it’s behind an experimental flag, only applies to new rooms, and isn’t available on the public app.element.io instance right now (the Labs screenshot they showed doesn’t show the option on element.io+matrix.org when I checked just now):
(That one isn’t even in the spec yet, it’ll take a lonnnnnng time before we see any real movement on it, possibly a year or two. A year or two before you can see encrypted messages from before you joined a room. Insanity.)
A contributor calls this encrypted metadata feature a “partial prototype:”
And that issue was opened in 2017. Pretty crazy they’ve been discussing this for nearly 10 years and it’s just now “a partial prototype,” but that’s Matrix for you.
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?
Looks like it’s behind an experimental flag, only applies to new rooms, and isn’t available on the public app.element.io instance right now (the Labs screenshot they showed doesn’t show the option on element.io+matrix.org when I checked just now):
https://github.com/element-hq/element-web/pull/31513
For it to work, looks like it needs another in-progress feature to allow new members to decrypt previous messages (Matrix can’t do that yet???):
https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-spec-proposals/pull/4268
(That one isn’t even in the spec yet, it’ll take a lonnnnnng time before we see any real movement on it, possibly a year or two. A year or two before you can see encrypted messages from before you joined a room. Insanity.)
A contributor calls this encrypted metadata feature a “partial prototype:”
https://github.com/element-hq/element-meta/issues/1214#issuecomment-3714132569
And that issue was opened in 2017. Pretty crazy they’ve been discussing this for nearly 10 years and it’s just now “a partial prototype,” but that’s Matrix for you.