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.
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Signal is a stop gap measure on the way to simplex
It did its job of providing privacy of content but meta data a d KYCd phones was a honeypot. Glowies got their relationship heat maps which is really all they wanted.
Once they need content, they will brick your end point with million zero day back doors caked onto everything.
Pegasus cellebrite etc is now used against normal targets.
5 years ago you would have to be a national security concern for such royal treament
Signal is the gold standard of secure messengers. If you're looking for decentralized go with xmpp and/or matrix.
Hosted in the US on amazon servers, subject to national security letters.
Depends on your threat model, as always. If you require absolute anonymity, it's tricky, because it uses phone number during the onboarding process, so get an anonymous pre-paid number and discard it after registration. After onboarding you don't need the number.
For the rest, it's about as "private" as you make it. It supports group messaing, calls and video, so obviously you need to be careful while using it. Everything is e2e encrypted and stays on your local device, the source is available and has been extensively audited.
But yeah, your threat model is the key answer to your question
No, and they are supported by US gov (last check), so no good can come of that.
Do you've reference about it ?
Quick googling comes up with only people refuting this claim.
Sure, we had signal gate, but the way that was received should make it pretty clear that it’s not supported for official use.
Even if it is, I don't think we should give the government the power to tell us what to not use. Otherwise they just pick any good projects, throw money at it, leak the data, and people jump to a less secure. Trust the code and nothing more
you have to register with your phone number.
But you dont have to give your phone number out to friends or peopole you meet.
Some family members use Molly-Foss and have no issues.
I use signal-foss from the Twin helix repo, A fork of Signal with proprietary Google binary blobs removed..
https://www.twinhelix.com/apps/signal-foss/
Signal from the F-droid - The guardian project repo, is just signal.
I read that the issue was with signal using google firebase, and that it was easier for the fascist piglets to track your messages through notifications.
I have found that you can actually delete a contact via molly but cannot do it via signal.
With signal you can only block a contact, which for me, is a privacy issues.
If I meet a random person, say on holiday, and we swap details, I want to delete them, not block them, where they remain in my block list forever.
I swap between Signal-FOSS and Molly if I want to delete a contact.
people will still expect you to share phone numbers to talk in signal in my personal experience, I really don't understand how they get so attached to such an archaic technology and often will refuse to use the alias system completely because remembering a random string of numbers is "simpler" somehow
They have your phone number but that's really all they have.
Some people say Bozos can read your metadata because it's hosted on AWS servers but I don't believe that.
The face that Signal needs phone numbers to sign up is very bad.
No one that has told me this has ever been able to offer up any sort of explanation, but please do feel free to give it ago.
The explanation is obvious. The phone numbers are a personally identifiable network of connections that is available to the people operating Signal servers. If this information is shared with the US government, then they can easily correlate this information with all the other data they have. For example, if somebody is identified as a person of interest then anybody they want to have secure communications would also be of interest.
Unlike Whatsapp, Signal doesn't store your network of contacts. They have your phone number, time of registration, and time of last connect to their servers. They go to great lengths to keep the rest private. In Signal's case, I don't see an issue at all, but I do see all the benefit.
