this post was submitted on 28 Aug 2024
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Privacy
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This message is definitely giving all the vibes of a disinformation/misinformation attempt. There is no metadata to harvest from signal.
Here is an example of all the extent of data that signal has on any given user: https://signal.org/bigbrother/cd-california-grand-jury/
It involves phone number, account creation time and last connected time. That's it. Nothing more.
The cross referencing of data is just nonsense. Google and meta already have your phone number. Adding signal info to it adds absolutely zero information to them. They have it all already. They know nothing of who you talk with, which groups you are part of.
The funding of Signal did involve public grants but that's not anything bad. Many projects and nonprofits receive public money. It does not imply that there are backdoors or anything like that. And signal was purposefully designed so that no matter who owns and operates it, the messages stay hidden independently on the server infrastructure. They did the best possible to remove themselves from the chain of trust. Expert cryptographers and auditors trust signal. Don't listen to this random ramble of an online stranger whose intentions are just to confuse you and make you doubt.
It's fascinating that these kinds of trolls come out of the woodwork any time obvious problems with Signal are brought up.
Phone numbers very obvious are metadata. If you think that cross referencing data is nonsense then you have absolutely no clue what you're talking about. It's not about Google or Meta having your phone number, it's about having a graph of people doing encrypted communication with each other over Signal. The graph of contacts is what's valuable.
What you absolutely shouldn't listen to are trolls who tell you to just trust that Signal is not abusing the data it's collecting about you. The first rule of security is that it can't be faith based.
What are you talking about? you get a phone number from signal, and what will you be able to derive from it? there is no graph. signal does not hold any "relationships" information.
The phone number is a unique identifier for your account. When you send a message to another user on Signal, that message goes to the server, and then gets routed to the other party. The server therefore has to know which parties talk to each other. Let me know if you have trouble understanding this and need it explained in simpler terms.
Youre right, thats how it works in almost all messaging apps. But signal implemented sealed sender specifically to counter this.
You can read more about it here: https://signal.org/blog/sealed-sender/
I encourage you to read the first paragraph, which is important in the context of our conversation.
I’m talking about the information the server has. The encrypted envelope has nothing to do with that. Your register with the server using your phone number, that’s a unique identifier for your account. When you send messages to other people via the server it knows what accounts you’re talking to and what their phone numbers are. The first paragraph amounts to nothing more than trust me bro because the only people who know what the Signal server actually does are the people operating it.
You are routing your traffic over the public internet. Nothing is secure at all. That's why we implement strong cryptography
Yes, that's why we don't leak personal data. You're finally starting to get it!
Seriously, what are you talking about? The vast majority of people don't want anonymity. Obviously Signal isn't cut out for that! The fact is, most people don't care about anonymity.
And what metadata can you harvest exactly from a UNIX timestamp and phone number? Signal can tell who is communicating to who, but they cannot read your messages.
Most people, even in this very thread, clearly don't understand the implications of phone number harvesting. Also do give citations for your bombastic claim that most people don't want anonymity.
The graph of who communicates with whom is precisely the problem. The government can easily correlate that data with all the other data they have on people, and then if somebody is identified as a person of interest it becomes easy to find other people who associate with them. So, here you just proved my point by showing that you yourself don't understand the implications of metadata harvesting.
This is entirely dependent on the situation. Privacy is not a black or white thing where you're completely private or not private at all. Everyone lives some part of their life publicly. I don't have data on this unfortunately, but typically where I live, people share phone numbers to people they personally know.
This is not within the vast majority of most peoples threat model.
I never suggested privacy was black and white. What I actually said was that a lot of people aren't making an informed choice. And whenever these threads come up, people pile on to dismiss legitimate problems with the way Signal works which makes it harder for people to make informed choices by spreading noise and misinformation. This very thread is full of wrong claims and dismissals.
Majority of people don't even need Signal because they're not talking about anything anybody cares about. At that point you can use whatever messenger that's convenient and your circle of friends uses. However, people shove Signal down other people's throat claiming that it's a privacy focused app which it demonstrably is not.
This is about Signal having the phone numbers. I don't think anybody "personally knows" Signal..
Anyone who has worked with centralized databases can tell you how useless that is. With message recipients and timestamps, its trivial to find the real sender.
Give me your phone number. I'll quickly be able to find out where you live.
Signal's hostility to 3rd party clients is a huge red flag.
Can you further explain? A red flag to open-source, federation and such, can't disagree. But to privacy and security? I'm not convinced.
Third party clients are the best way to verify that the protocol works as advertised.
If you backdoored your client, then you will naturally oppose anyone else who develops a client.
Its the tankies.
Honestly if they can recommend something better I'm all for it but I haven't heard anything.
Take a look here for some alternatives:
https://dessalines.github.io/essays/why_not_signal.html#good-alternatives
Also just because there are no alternatives doesn't mean your default position should be we just have to trust whatever exists now because it's good enough. Or that we can't criticize it ruthlessly, distrust it. Call it out and as a result of that build perhaps the desire for something better, a fix as it were.
The evidence and history clearly points towards Signal being very suspicious and likely in bed with the feds. This is not conspiracy thinking. Conspiracy thinking is thinking that the country/empire that gave away old German engima machines whose code they'd cracked to developing countries without telling them they'd cracked it in the late 40s/early 50s, that went on to establish a crypto company just to subvert its encryption. That's done everything Snowden revealed has in fact changed suddenly for the first time in half a century for no particular reason and not to its own benefit. That's fanciful thinking. That's a leap of logic away from the proven trends, the pattern of behavior, and indeed the incentivizes to continue using their dominant position to maintain dominance and power. They didn't back down on the clipper chip because they just gave up and decided to let people have privacy and rights. They gave up on it because they found better ways of achieving the same results with plausible deniability.
Also why is everything "tankies" with you people. Privacy advocates point out the obvious and suddenly it's a communist conspiracy. LOL
Matrix and XMPP are not alternatives and are worse for privacy and security
Simplex Chat is actually is pretty sold but isn't the most user friendly
Briar is very cool but its complexity makes it hard to use. It also has problems with real time communications
XMPP is exactly as good or bad for privacy as the servers and clients you choose. It's a protocol, not a service. Unlike Signal, which is a brand/app/service package.
The protocol is worse for privacy
Is that better?
'Trust me bro'
The problem is, you're comparing apples with orchards. Analogous would be: 'email is worse for privacy than yahoomail'. Plus in this scenario yahoomail only lets you send emails to yahoomail addresses.