It’s a good move; it shows they are no interested in popularity but Privacy and Security
Signal refusing to federate with WhatsApp, even though meta says they will still use the signal protocol is the most bone headed decision I have ever seen from them.
There no better chance to break the network effect than this.
Meta could easily have the WhatsApp client upload decryption keys to their servers without any notification to the user.
Not sure what you mean, of course WhatsApp can disable it's own encryption. That would be an argument for open source third party apps and interoperability.
Yeah that sucks, Signal is my preferred app and I wish I could get rid of WhatsApp without having to convert everyone.
me neither
This is a centralization problem. Come and force federation upon my SimpleX server in Iceland!
Indeed. I wish your comment was the most visible here.
Signal and Threema can be all about privacy, but they are still companies which can make money only by keeping their service as centralized as possible.
Decentralised messaging like Matrix, XMPP, Jami, have no issue with interoperability.
In a statement to the publication, Signal president Meredith Whittaker says, “Our privacy standards are extremely high and not only will we not lower them, we want to keep raising them. Currently, working with Facebook Messenger, iMessage, WhatsApp, or even a Matrix service would mean a deterioration of our data protection standards.”
Ugh, okay Meredith, let's pretend it's impossible to handle this with user experience that makes the user acknowledge their conversation with a WhatsApp user is not secure. Meanwhile if the only viable way for this conversion to occur is to have WhatsApp on both ends, the situation less secure. So according to Meredith, the choice is between less overall security or not having conversations with people who don't use Signal. That could makes sense for her salary but it surely is a net negative for Signal users some of which will have to install WhatsApp since they won't be able to afford not to have those conversations.
Yeah we’re like super serious about privacy so we require you to make you’re account based on a unique, hard to change, personally identifiable, insecure data point and require you to show it to everyone you talk to. The fact that they’re only now starting to test hiding your phone number is beyond asinine. Any arguments signal has about security I might listen to but their concept of privacy is laughable.
There is one thing about interoperability that I don't see many people talking about:
Your messages going to and being handled by other services means you'd be subject to their TOS and privacy policy as well.
As long as services are transparent about it so users can make informed decisions based on it, that's generally fine.
But then services like Beeper, or just Matrix bridges in general, make it so anyone can setup such a connection between services without their contacts even knowing about it.
Your messages going to and being handled by other services means you'd be subject to their TOS and privacy policy as well.
This is true of literally every one of your contacts, too. When you send someone a message, they can screenshot, copy, archive, and forward however they see fit (and most people don't govern themselves by any kind of TOS or privacy policy). Which then means that if any one of your contacts chooses to use another service as a bridge, or as an archival tool, you're naturally going to expose your messages to that service, on that contact's terms.
But that isn't about interoperability per se. It's about how other people store and use their copy of data shared between multiple users. Apple iMessage isn't interoperable with anything, but users still have conversations archived all the way back to the beginning of the service over a decade ago, and can choose to export those messages to be saved elsewhere. (For example, I use a bridge for iMessage so that I can view them on my Android phone, but the mechanism is software that leverages the Mac's accessibility API).
Some of us are data hoarders. If you're gonna have a conversation with people like me, you'll have to trust that we don't use those archives in a way that either inadvertently/negligently or intentionally exposes that data to some bad actor. I'd like to think I do a good job of respecting my friends' privacy, and secure my systems, but I'm probably not perfect.
Meta wants to federate with the whole fediverse eventually. This is first up, then Threads. Remains to be seen if they’ll bother with a Lemmy instance but I wouldn’t be shocked.
So far though the response by the fediverse has been “nah”.
I was hoping to move to signal in the whatapp network. Unfortunately in Brazil you cannot live without whatapp.
You could try and run both
Keep whatsapp, and slowly switch contacts to Signal (it might just be close friends and family). That's what people around me are doing
My wife told me to fuck off when I installed signal on her phone 😔
Haha, that’s kinda funny. Then people are like.
Just tell your friends and family to stop using iMessage. Like everyone will be ok to switch their routine just like that.
What sort of irks me is what a mixed bag EU regulation is. Some is good (GDPR), not denying that. Some is annoying (you're going to be accepting cookies 100 times a day until you're dead thanks to them), and Whatsapp runs on all devices, so while interoperability nice, even as a free-software, Linux person I don't really care.
However, if you have to deal with friends or family in the US and you don't have an iPhone though, god help you. They don't care about this.
I guess my complaint is that EU regulation may seem legally elegant, but I think it is sometimes quite blind to the real situation on the ground.
It looks good on the books but we still, say, don't have a standard ARM boot process for smartphones that would help users not be dependent on whatever shitty ROM the OEM wants them to have. That would be life changing, but it will never even be talked about.
I partially agree with you, and of course I hate those cookie banners, they're completely annoying.
But please remember that it's not the EU's fault is every website is trying to violate your privacy.
If websites weren't tracking everything you do, then cookie banners wouldn't be needed.
I think we should collectively ask for websites to stop spying on us, not changing the cookie banners regulation.
That's already a solution to cookie banners: the "do not track" setting. It's been tested in court in Germany and confirmed to count as rejected permission for GDPR purposes. Websites dinky have to obey it.
It's currently slowly gaining traction, there's a privacy advocacy group suing high profile targets over this to create awareness.
We also need a formal change to the cookie law/GDPR to acknowledge "do not track" as the preferred method. Then the banners will slowly go away.
Yep, all the EU done is forced websites to have consent if the website want to process personal data. There are many analytics that does not process IP address or fingerprint and so does not require consent banner. Be annoyed on the websites, not this law.
The cookie consent also has a huge fail whale of unintended consequences - training users to click [accept], or really [anything], to make the annoyance just go away.
And nefarious actors have their run of the place now. They can slip onerous terms into EULAs and know they will largely be accepted.
As well as random [Continue] boxes to install malware or whatever they want since users are so well trained to click just to get it the fuck off their screen.
On the one hand I agree with them sticking to their guns.
On the other, the number of contacts I have using signal has dropped off a cliff, from 12 to just one. It certainly isn't rising. The people I know who used it have abandoned it and went back to WhatsApp.
Getting rid of SMS support was a mistake.
I'd personally prefer that when messaging with someone using WhatsApp, they make clear to you that Facebook can and will have some metadata, but not the contents of the chat itself.
IMO a good but imperfect solution is preferable to nobody using Signal.
Back in the 80s and 90s we imagined a world of interoperable standards all agreed upon by the industry leaders for the benefit of all.
Then capitalism took over and shat on EVERYTHING.
I understand her point and imho that's what makes signal a superior option to the others but because of these extreme choices I've seen the usage of signal gradually go down (might be wrong for the total number of users) around me. Now I don't anyone who uses signal anymore.
it's a real shame it's ridiculous to be using whatsapp but I have whatsapp installed on my phone not signal because that's what everyone uses.
Signal were fools to remove the SMS support from their app. That was a good way to get people in to use the system - they could have insecure SMS chats with those not on signal, and secure signal chats with those on it. The app would warn you when someone didn't have signal and the chat was insecure.
It was a really good "trojan horse" route into people's lives. I was using signal every day and it was easier encouraging others to make the switch because it was a convenient app.
Then the devs removed that and dumped all their users back onto other SMS apps.
Now I have 3 apps - an SMS app, Signal and WhatsApp. I barely ever use Signal now. I want to use it more but so few people I know use it, and it's not the first place people message me from.
Removing SMS support was a huge strategic misstep. They should have been the bridge for people to move from SMS to secure chat.
Extremely bad take in my opinion. Not supporting alternatives means you force users into installing the alternatives
Matrix will implement a bridge using the new api, that's enough for me.
I'm indifferent, since I've got both installed, there's no escaping having to use WhatsApp in many countries around the globe. If I want to keep in touch with family/friends then only one or two contacts use signal, for everyone else it's WhatsApp or the alternative is SMS.
I'm also indifferent though because of I want the interoperability, Beeper is doing fine.
Use matrix, setup bridge (defederate from matrix network if you want), meet your friends where theyre at.
Honestly would love to use signal to chat with my whatsapp contacts. Signal could just throw in privacy notice when messaging with someone whatsapp or facebook messenger.
Currently I have signal installed and used to use it to message with my so but we have both moved to discord and use whatsapp to communicate with those that do not use discord. Still holding on to signal if and when some oddball from my contacts decides to use it instead.
moving from signal to discord is not going to be exactly helpful for your privacy, discord is completely unencrypted
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
