In an effort to make it easier for people to maintain some semblance of privacy, meshtastic implemented a flag to add to messages. The flag describes whether the sender wishes their messages to be forwarded to any mosquito servers. By default this is set to false, or “I don’t want my messages sent to mosquito servers.”

My primary issue here is that this feels like theater to me. Admittedly there is very little to be done to actually secure things like location, the software allows you to mess with the precision (moving your transmitted location within a pre-defined amount of space), or just not transmit it at all. Even with those options there is only so far away you can possibly be, and still get a signal to someone else.

I think this provides a false sense of privacy, where the understanding is “the software won’t let people record me” which, sure, by default it won’t. This change is not claimed by the folks over at meshtastic to be a guarantee, and indeed it is warned that they are relying on people not ignoring the flag.