Privacy

31952 readers

588 users here now

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.

In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.

Some Rules

Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
Don't promote proprietary software
Try to keep things on topic
If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
Be nice :)

Related communities

Chat rooms

[Matrix/Element]Dead
Discord

much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

How good you feel good about your privacy using apps such as Signal? (lemmy.wtf)

submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

93 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Convincing people to use apps such as Signal is hard work and most can't be convinced. But with those you manage to convince, do you feel happy to talk to them on Signal?

The problem is these people use Signal on Android/IOS which can't be trusted and IOS has recently been in the news for having a backdoor. And it has also been revealed that american feds are able to read everyone's push notifications and they do this as mass surveillance.

So not only do you have to convince people to use Signal which is an incredibly difficult challenge. You also have to convince them to go into settings to disable message and sender being included in the push notifications. And then there's the big question is the Android and IOS operating systems are doing mass surveillance anyway. And many people find it taking a lot of effort to type on the phone so they install Signal on the computer which is a mac or Windows OS.

So I don't think I feel comfortable sending messages in Signal but it's better than Whatsapp.

These were some thoughts to get the discussion started and set the context.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] refalo 7 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

They ask the push providers (Apple/Google) for data on the push token from e.g. a messaging app. This way they associate the account from an app with an identity.

Very overlooked point. You can find privacy guides online but very few even suggest that FCM etc. might have privacy issues, let alone explain exactly why. It seems this has already been used by law enforcement in the past: https://www.wired.com/story/apple-google-push-notification-surveillance/

The Molly-FOSS fork of Signal (which aims to be even more secure/private) actually supports self-hosted push notifications using UnifiedPush.

I also found this comment:

As far as I know, FCM on Android can be configured to use a notification payload (which is piped through Google's servers). But for a release app this is discouraged, especially if you are privacy conscious. An app would normally use FCM to receive a trigger and look up the received message from the app's own backend. See here for more information.