Digital Resources for Mental Health Professionals: Safety and Security (Part 3)
This is part 3 of a series on digital safety and security for mental health professionals, read part 1, part 2.
Encrypted Communication
End-to-end encryption (E2EE)1 is a welcome layer of security for communicating with patients. Signal was the first IM application to offer this. Signal is also very good for audio and video calls.
Whatsapp offers E2EE but it is developed by Meta which is not to be trusted.
Try to set Whatsapp or Signal to automatically delete messages in your chats after 90 days. This automatically reduces the patient information that may be on your phone.
For video calls, Zoom became the default during the pandemic. Their privacy and security practices haven't always been the best. They claim that they offer E2EE, but this is not the case if a user uses the browser instead of the official app.
Jitsi is the FOSS2 alternative to Zoom. Initially, it couldn't compete in terms of performance to Zoom but now it has improved considerably. Despite offering E2E encryption they state that there may be limitations.
This post is part of a challenge to write 150 blog posts of 150 words each this year. This is post 12 out of 150.
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End-to-end encryption means that the messages are encrypted and decrypted on the devices of users. Any server in the middle can't decrypt and read these messages. This is different from traditional encrypted communication where the data is encrypted only during its journey between the users and the server. ↩
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FOSS is short for Free/Open Source Software ↩