this post was submitted on 25 Aug 2024
133 points (96.5% liked)
Privacy
32424 readers
311 users here now
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don't promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I think you missed the point there. The value for the NSA is in knowing which phone numbers communicate with other phone numbers which is precisely the metadata that Signal leaks. This allows you to build networks of users who are doing private communication. Next, you can cross reference the phone numbers with the data from Google, Meta, etc. and then if you see that one of them is a person of interest, then you immediately know the other people they talk to who are now also of interest.
The fact that people keep trying to downplay this is truly phenomenal to me. Once again, Signal is an app that uses a central server based in the US, that almost certainly shares data with the government. Anybody who minimally cares about their privacy should be concerned about this.
Signal is not an app that's private. Period. If you don't understand this then you don't understand what the term privacy means.
Even then, you're jumping to the conclusion that
a) Signal sends this data to the NSA and b) Signal doesn't protect phone numbers in somr way
Neither of these do I care about enough to keep entertaining this conversation. Goodbye.
Assuming that data that can be leaked is being leaked is the only sensible thing to do if you care about privacy. Clearly this is too difficult a concept for you to wrap your head around.
Thanks for at least being honest that you don't actually care about privacy. Bye.
Aint this is the rule among cryptography types anyway?
Right, and it's strange to me that such a fundamental rule is being ignored when it comes to Signal. All of a sudden people start making all kinds of excuses as to why it's not a problem in this case.
Has this been confirmed? I had this theory before but got told this ain't true...
If the metadata is being leaked then you have to assume it's being used in an adversarial way. Privacy can't be trust based. Either the protocol is secure and it guarantees that your metadata is private, or you're taking it on faith that people operating Signal servers are good actors and will never leak this data to anybody you wouldn't want them to.
Also worth noting that thanks to US laws, Signal would not even be allowed to say they're sharing data with the government even if they wanted to.
I have no doubt that signal will turn over whatever they had but does they have the info about who is contacting who?
I was explained that they don't
Obvi all this shit is a trust me bro
As far as I know, nothing in the protocol prevents the server from connecting who is talking to whom. In fact, given that the phone number is how an account is identified, the server effectively has to do this in order to pass messages between people.