Invidious link: https://invidious.tiekoetter.com/watch?v=TzGEmXync5M
An overview of Signal’s long list of flaws (phone number id, Play service payments, centralized infrastructure, etc) and the history of The Signal Foundation of ignoring many of these issues.
Signal is disappointing. And I am tired of pretending that it’s not. I have been using and recommending Signal for longer than it existed. Signal just came out with a feature we have been waiting for for 8 years.
You see 8 years ago, the only flaw Signal had was that it required a phone number to register and find contacts. This was bad, because it meant you couldn’t get an anonymous Signal account, which meant you could get hacked or abused by anyone who knew your phone number. It was also easy for authoritarians to censor people’s access to Signal by denying phone registrations by country code.
The reason for the phone number requirement was to prevent spam. The primary function, was to use your phonebook to quickly onboard new users and send notifications whenever anyone in your contact list signed up on Signal. A very convenient Silicon Valley feature that allowed people to quickly connect with their friends and also let domestic abusers find out their victims are trying to contact a lawyer’s office over Signal.
One thing to note, Signal has never purported to be “private”. It is “secure”. There’s a huge difference. Everyone has to find a balance between privacy and usability. Not having phone ID means no way to reduce the chance a user is bot as well as if you don’t register a personal name or phone number or anything else traceable, it makes it difficult for users to find eachother. And as for tracking the source and destination of messages, again if those are random destination routing IDs for a particular conversation, it makes it difficult to route to multiple devices. And if you don’t include source identifiers then there’s no way to block a spammer or other hostile user or provide delivery receipts to the sender. If you eliminate the storage of messages on the centralized server entirely and have it just be for routing, then if a device is offline at the moment a message is composed, it can’t be sent. These are just some examples of privacy vs usability. I won’t go into real-time video and audio as they are even more complex.
What signal is, is a system that does not store the keys for the messages themselves, thus as long as all user’s devices are secure, the messages are secure. This it does very well.
If you want a private messaging system, there are many options out there, but Signal needs to be usable for the masses of technically illiterate as well as secure. These are more for things like journalist who need privacy for whistleblowers. In that case the lack of usability is a reasonable tradeoff.
Of course I’m oversimplifying some things, but the basic idea is that Signal is not a private messaging app, it is a secure messaging app.
Uhhhh yes it has? That’s like the main thing it’s purported to be? You can control + F “privacy” 4 separate times on the homepage. I think you’re conflating this with anonymity .
It’s more private than something like Facebook Messenger or most other popular chat apps, that’s not it’s primary purpose and again, it does not purport to 100% privacy as it does to 100% security of messages. Anonymity is one way to achieve privacy, but it isn’t the only way. Unfortunately, it’s the only way if you want to obey laws in most countries, basically privacy by making it impossible for the company to give any information to police, courts, etc.
The OP though is primarily complaining about privacy and not security and that’s what I’m trying to differentiate. It’s never ever said it gives a 100% private experience but does purport to making messages content as secure as possible.
Again, it does and it is. It’s plastered all over every webpage and document they have. You are confused.
Again, OP video is referring to anonymity, among other things.
Google private vs secure communications. Privacy is the company not sharing information about your communications. Legally this is nearly impossible for a corporate entity without anonymity. But they could just as easily keep the data about who you are talking to secured and thus your privacy protected. They are private commercially in that they don’t sell that information like most messaging apps, but they can’t refuse an order from a government entity and thus are not 100% private. Again anonymity is one method of keeping your data private, the other is to have 100% control over that data like if you self hosted the central server then Signal could be private while still not being anonymous.
So anonymity is the only legal say to be private, but it isn’t the only way to be private. They do keep your data private from data brokers, thus some privacy, but not 100%. Anonymity is much more difficult to accomplish while maintaining usability. Privacy is only difficult to accomplish while maintaining functionality because of legal obligations. So their policies are privacy oriented, but they can’t guarantee that without anonymity which they can’t do without loss of functionality.
What they can do, and do well, is security. Secure messages, security of metadata in motion, etc., but metadata at rest while secure, is not private from governments, only from corporations (currently, though this could change and is why people think they want anonymity not realizing they lose functionality.) Signal is secure, and as private as it can given the legal obligations, but it could change policies and decide not to keep your data private and then anonymity is needed which is what the OP is saying they need, but Signal has never said they will provide.
No u.
It isn’t, and they don’t.
They don’t have to, because they are 100% private. They don’t have information to share.
I wasn’t even following þe argument but þis caught my eye.
Þank you 😂
No they absolutely know who every message on the server came from and who it’s bound for as well as various other metadata. Governments can request this data as, while it is stored securely, the company has access and thus must give this information upon receiving valid requests. This is not 100% privacy especially in cases of things like journalists and government corruption whistleblowers. They can’t say what they said, but they can say a particular user talked to a journalist.
Uhhhh no? They absolutely do not? And the page I just linked you to proves it. It’s full of requests from the government where they did not provide any of the information you suggested.
If their servers have no knowledge of who sent the message then what’s the point of accounts and if they don’t know who the message is for, how do they deliver it to all devices logged in under a given account, but not to every other user. Yeah they don’t store an unencrypted list of every contact a user has or their user profile (which is what the site you point to says), but they do store metadata on the message itself and because those accounts are linked to real world phone numbers, they know who it belongs to, or at least the government does, not that it’s hard to find out. This is exactly what the OP is saying and why anonymity is the only option for true privacy, which Signal does not provide, nor does it purport to. Yeah they don’t sell your data. Yeah they don’t want your contact lists, but they do hold a lot of private information about your activity out of necessity to receive and deliver messages.
If you’re not even going to read the content of what you’re referencing, I’m sorry but I’ll have to stop my responses here. I don’t have time or energy for trolling or willful or arrogant ignorance.