Basically I am looking for a messaging platform like signal or? but with anonymous signup, perfect forward secrecy, capable of video chat, sending photos the usual uses in today’s life. But with a panic button. So that any party member could use said button to wipe all other members devices of any data instantly inside the messaging app. So if one member gets compromised, or lost their device, stolen device ect, any other member could wipe all chats, call log, and any other data strictly inside the messaging client instantly for everyone involved. Disolving the group like it never existed rendering the data unrecoverable. Amazons Wickr used to have most of these features but it is being discontinued December 2023 and who trusts amazon with their data. Does something like this exist? Sorry if I’m not explaining it well I’ll do my best to clarify and update this post. I am not trying to delete the whole device. Just the data inside the messaging app. If that does not exist. What about a separate app that could delete the entire messaging platform from the device when triggered. Assume all necessary requirements are met and this is for daily use. Between a group of trusted parties.
Updated wording to clarify the objective as replies where getting misunderstood.
I mean theoretically if you are hosting your own chat server, for example on Matrix, you can easily make all the chats unaccessible from the clients by issuing a command to shutdown your server or simply the chat server service if there’s no content cached locally.
I think you can do this pretty easily with a raspberry pi by connecting via ssh…
Just use a shell script that changes the static ip to something else after the command to shutdown the service/wipe out the data (depending on what your goal is) has been issued, or use a vpn or something like that if possible, because anyone issuing the command would need to know your server ip.
And issuing a command by ssh to a remote server both from smartphone or pc should be as easy that you can actually build a very small app for that, or use some app that creates shortcuts that directly connects and issue custom commands.
That way you are forced to give people your new ip every time chats become unaccessible/deleted and someone can’t connect back even if wanting to without talking to you, unless you decide you can use the older ip for whatever reason.
Of course not using your real ip but using some service like a vpn or proxy (or tor?) would be much better here, but i don’t really know how.
That can give you full power on the chat history and create the said “panic button” for every client involved.
Wouldn’t chats be stored locally though? So even if the service was shutdown the app and its local contents would remain. Or does the service load chats after connecting to the home server, then your scenario plays correctly. Matrix doesn’t offer ephemeral messaging which would be a stop gap in this case if stored locally. I’m not familiar with Matrix.
There’s no way to prevent someone from retaining data once they have it. The clients would have to voluntarily cooperate.
Are there matrix clients that do this? Only fetch messages from server when needed and not store locally?
I guess probably, because Matrix is thought for private chatting, i guess someone else might have had this same idea, i think matrix is opensource so there must be some client that does this.
Even if there is, though, that would only affect you and the messages you read. If you sent it to others, they could still do what they wanted with it.
Yeah sure, you have to trust your users