this post was submitted on 30 Jun 2024
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Privacy
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If only Signal were the default messaging app!!!
Signal, being owned by a nonprofit has a bit more resistance to that than most.
That's the main reason I recommend it over alternatives with similar technical capabilities, such as WhatsApp.
Any good app/product that becomes very popular will be inevitably acquired by an evil company at some point. That's why the default cannot be good.
But don't you just get tired of jumping through hoops for every little thing these days?
Big tech needs to stop being evil. There, problem solved, right.....right.....ha
Do you know that everything in the universe has a price so it stays balanced? Same goes to this. You either deal with it (spend effort) or switch to a worse (evil) option where you pay with your data (much more valuable thing) to get more consistency.
Not gonna happen. Even if you put highly moral or religious people on the management, someone will find a way to ruin it. The bigger the project gets, the bigger effort bad actors will be ok with taking to take over it. The xz vulnerability is the perfect example. The bad actor there spent like 2 years to get trust of the main developer.
The only company that can acquire Signal is another non-profit.
There's also the government that can force them to add some PhotoDNA or backdoor related stuff, as well as give them some mandatory-to-note "suggestions". It will be hard to hide it because it's an open-source project but the server side is not and the government may just ban the app altogether.
No they can't. Signal has and will pull out of countries before caving to that.
Still, a decentralized protocol, not a platform, would have a much easier time circumventing stupid laws like this, as well as censorship.
If you want to argue about their centralized nature, we can, and I will agree, but that's not what we were discussing.