Matrix's origin is Israel's intelligence community. One could argue the authors are rebels, being insiders themselves, who've begun to fight back against the surveillance state that they intimately know. That's a naive and foolish thing to think. The project's design is awful from a 'privacy' perspective, with the design specifically allowing third-parties to silently 'intercept' users' data--all whilst still being 'E2EE'. It's a feature. That's the amusing thing about its absolutely shit design, but regardless of design choices, encryption has always been a lagging component of the program.

The cynic might observe that the whole thing was proposed with foresight as to create a compromised leader ready to be adopted by organizations that felt they needed a higher degree of security. Matrix is a good solution, or so government bureaucrats are told.

Let Tel Aviv inside.

Matrix is just the protocol so if you think that synapse (the server implementation developed by Element which does have ties to Amdocs) is somehow logging all your data and sending it back or whatever, just use a different implementation. For example, tuwunel is sponsored and used by Switzerland’s government.