Privacy

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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.

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Signal Is More Than Encrypted Messaging. Under Meredith Whittaker, It’s Out to Prove Surveillance Capitalism Wrong (www.wired.com)

submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 months ago (2 children)

JWZ seven years ago: Signal

When you install Signal, it asks for access to your contacts, and says very proudly, "we don't upload your contacts, it all stays on your phone."

And then it spams all of your contacts who have Signal installed, without asking your first.

And it shares your phone number with everyone in your contacts who has Signal installed.

And then when you scream ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME and delete your account and purge the app, guess what? All those people running Signal still have your phone number displayed for them right there in plain text. Deleting your account does not delete the information that the app shared without your permission.

So yeah. Real nice "privacy" app you've got there.

Update, 2018: Subsequently.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Wow didn't even know about that, what a shit show. It's so weird how Signal has become a sacred cow in the west now, and you can't have a rational discussion about its many problems without a whole bunch of trolls piling on saying you should just put faith in Signal unconditionally.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago (1 children)

It is a decent app, it does what it says. Daddy can't read your shit until quantum break encryption.

Real question is whether it is a honeypot to make edgelords feelz good. Strong allegation, no doubt but we are also in the grey zone it seems. Based on that, you have to assume, they are farming the info at least to the security apparatus.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago

That's my view as well, the only way to know that data isn't being used for adversarial purposes is not to share it in the first place. I think it's fine to use Signal as long as it's an informed choice. The primary issue I have is that people don't seem to want to accept that Signal collects phone numbers and that this could be used in a nefarious way. It seems to be an ideological stance as opposed to a rational one.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

The app (locally, on your device) checks if someone from your contact list installed (became available) on Signal, and if they did, you get notified by the app.

And it shares your phone number with everyone in your contacts who has Signal installed.

Someone can get notified only if they already have you in their contact list (so they already have your phone number), and have Signal installed.

I still wish you could choose if you want others to be notified tho...