If you read my previous article about Virtual Private Servers, you’ll recall that one of the major benefits that this technology enables is the ability to run your own cloud applications, while maintaining control over your private data. One of the biggest potential leak points for your private data comes when you communicate with other people through services such as text-messaging, iMessage, and Hangouts (or whatever Google is calling their messaging service this week). There are of course some great open-source encrypted messaging options such as Signal (which I’ll go over in a future article), but another route to having more privacy is hosting your own messaging system for friends and family to use, and a great option for that is the open-source Rocket.Chat.

Rocket.Chat homepage

What Is Rocket.Chat

Rocket.Chat is an open-source web chat server (with mobile, web, and desktop clients also available) that was first launched in 2015. In their own words:

“(Rocket.Chat is) a great solution for communities and companies wanting to privately host their own chat service.”

The company’s business model is to provide a hosted instance of Rocket.Chat for companies or individuals that don’t want to run their own server. While they have a core product team that helps guide continued development of the product, much of the ongoing work comes from the open-source community. The product was originally written as part of an internal tool for a client but, after being released as an open-source project, quickly took on a life of its own.

Rocket.Chat is heavily supported by the open-source development community.

How This Helps With Privacy

When you trust your private conversations with a third-party, what happens with that information is almost entirely out of your control. Companies can mine your conversations in order for advertisers to better target consumers, or they could potentially leak the data to hackers. Even if you trust these companies to treat your private data safely, they can change the rules at any time, or they can be compelled by law to make your data available.

The only way to ensure that your conversations stay private is to keep them under as much control as possible. By running your own VPS and installing a chat server, you can limit conversations to close friends and family, and can erase this data as easily as erasing the server.

One benefit of running your own chat server? No privacy policy necessary.

How To Get It

Installing the Rocket.Chat server is pretty straightforward; if you were able to start your VPS subscription, installing the server is not much more complicated. The specific steps will vary depending on your VPS provider, but the general process looks like this:

Set up your VPS instance to use Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. Log in to your server via SSH (DigitalOcean’s instructions, for example). Follow these instructions to install Rocket.Chat via Snap on Ubuntu (this is the easiest method possible, you definitely want to do it this way). (optional but good step) If you have a domain name set up and pointing at your VPS, you can follow this step to set up SSL for more security.

That’s pretty much it for the server part of things. After that, you can access your Rocket.Chat server via a browser (either “http://your-domain.com:3000” if you stopped at step 3, or “https://yourdomain.com” if you went to step 4) and finish configuring your server’s name and other settings. When that’s done, you can install the iOS app, Android app, or keep using the browser.

This is what you’ll see if everything worked properly.

Alternative Options

While Rocket.Chat isn’t the only free, open-source group chat service out there, it’s certainly one of the better ones. That said, a few options include:

Of course, group-chat hosted on your own server is just one solution to secure, private conversations, and for personal chat doesn’t scale much past your friends and family (after which YOU end up becoming the privacy threat). There are more person-to-person, traditional messaging systems like Signal and Telegram, which I’ll cover in the future.

Parting Thoughts

Your personal conversations likely contain some of your most important private data. Putting your trust in large corporations to keep your data private is futile, whether the risk comes as part of their business model, legal requirements, or security incidents. There are many great options available to implementing a private method of communication, but the biggest obstacle is likely to be convincing your friends, family, and others to adopt this new method. Information is power, so your best bet is to help inform them of the benefits of keeping your conversations private.

Hopefully you enjoyed this article! To get some more great Practical Privacy tips, check out my other articles!