good points altough the number is note saved. the hash of the phonenumber is hashed so Signal could not hand out your number, just the hash.

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.

Yep, none of us got to where we are all at once. We learned about things over time, and made changes over time.

It's a process just like any other type of personal development/ habit building

This is exactly my take. It basically holds for Signal too.

The question of self-censorship is too often overlooked IMO. The knowledge that nobody is reading your messages except their intended recipients is empowering and liberating. No one is filling a database with information about you and your friends, because they can't. You can say exactly what you would say at the dinner table and not think twice about it.

In a police state with mass surveillance (we all know the big examples) you don't have this privilege. Whether or not you think about it consciously, you are constantly monitoring and policing what you say - and therefore ultimately, to some extent, what you think.

I've been in a couple of those places recently. I can tell you that just the banal act of using Signal there (sometimes over VPN) felt almost exhilarating, like jumping the prison walls.

In historical terms, free speech is a vanishing rare thing. It absolutely is not the norm and it bothers me that so many people in the West don't seem to know this. We should not take it for granted.

Signal refuses to even try to accommodate for UnifiedPush or MQTT for those not using play services requiring an extra battery-draining socket to their servers. You are also still required to use one of the mobile duopoly OSs as a primary device to register (SIM still required). Good luck if you use a Linux phone, KaiOS, or just don’t want an ever-present tracking beacon on you. We all know the Electron-based desktop client is shit. I would flip this on its head & say it is the service’s probably if they choose to prioritize & mainly support the shitty mobile OS duopoly it’s their problem for providing a bad service & getting the criticism they deserve.

The problem I have with Signal is that it itself pushes people onto the "shitty operating systems". It does not allow registering from desktop, at least officially. There are workarounds, but they're cumbersome (especially for a non-technical person, whom Signal is supposed to appeal to), and the official client outright tells you go to use a phone first. And even then, apparently the desktop client is not even full-featured, and not the priority.

I know there are degoogled OSes (running Graphene myself), but you'd need to get lucky or choose a phone with this in mind, while a random given laptop is likely to be able to run Linux.

This maybe be what they are referring to: https://9to5mac.com/2023/12/27/most-sophisticated-iphone-attack-chain-ever-seen/

“Feel,” “happy,” “comfortable”… Privacy doesn’t care about your feelings.

The motivation to do the work, spend time learning the risks and available mitigations, disrupt existing social connections in order to adopt something better, inconvenience friends and family, partially isolate one's self by avoiding the popular systems... all of these things are part of improving privacy in the real world, and at least for many people, fueled by a person's feelings. Don't discount the human factors just because you can't quantify them.

They funded encryption too. Why don't you stop using that?

Wow, the whole argument of the article is basically: funded in part by US government = bad, and making a lot of assumptions, nothing more.

The fund is designated to: “support open technologies and communities that increase free expression, circumvent censorship, and obstruct repressive surveillance as a way to promote human rights and open societies."

One should question the commitment of a fund that dedicates itself to "obstructing surveillance", while being created by a government who runs the most expansive surveillance system in world history. And how the US might define the terms "human rights", and "open society" differently from those who know the US's history in those areas.

How laughable, that is not an argument, it’s nothing more than a guessing game, ignoring that there are different parts of government and different objectives can be true.

Signal's use luckily never caught on by the general public of China, whose government prefers autonomy, rather than letting US tech control its communication platforms, as most of the rest of the world naively allows. (For example, India's most popular social media apps, are Facebook and Youtube, meaning that US surveillance giants own and control the everyday communications of a country much larger than their own). Signal instead became used by US and western activists, and due to the contradictions of surveillance capitalism, also now its general populace.

You have to be kidding right? Championing china, which created a fucking surveillance state and is heavily monitoring the citizens, as an example?

There are several open protocols that meet your criteria that aren’t Matrix (with most of them using double-ratchet encryption similar to if not exactly like Signal). Due to server costs (Matrix eats a lot of RAM & storage), medium-sized entities usually bow out so the Matrix network largely consist of a few 1–10 user servers & massive centralization around Matrix.org & the hosted servers they provide. Since almost all the messages get synced to the Matrix.org server if just one Matrix.org user is in your room or whatever, Matrix have the largest access to all that metadata.

2. distributed server network controlled by many entities (resilience)

It only fully meets the first criterion, yes. But personally I give it a bit of credit for the second too, in that it belongs to a non-profit foundation with multiple stakeholders, somewhat like Wikimedia.

These two things are not at all equivalent, or even comparable.

the Matrix stack. BUT! It’s hard to set up and nobody uses it!

Is it really that hard? For me it was just downloading an app and creating an account--easier than setting up Facebook Messenger. I think it doesn't yet have the network that Messenger/Signal/Whatsapp have, which makes it harder to use with others, but setting up has been easy in my experience.

indeed they are ☞ President of @signalapp : https://mastodon.world/@Mer__edith/111563865413484025

PSA: We've received questions about push notifications. First: push notifications for Signal NEVER contain sensitive unencrypted data & do not reveal the contents of any Signal messages or calls–not to Apple, not to Google, not to anyone but you & the people you're talking to.

In Signal, push notifications simply act as a ping that tells the app to wake up. They don't reveal who sent the message or who is calling (not to Apple, Google, or anyone). Notifications are processed entirely on your device. This is different from many other apps.

What's the background here? Currently, in order to enable push notifications on the dominant mobile operating systems (iOS and Android) those building and maintaining apps like Signal need to use services offered by Apple and Google.

Apple simply doesn’t let you do it another way. And Google, well you could (and we've tried), but the cost to battery life is devastating for performance, rendering this a false option if you want to build a usable, practical, dependable app for people all over the world.*

So, while we do not love Big Tech choke points and the control that a handful of companies wield over the tech ecosystem, we do everything we can to ensure that in spite of this dynamic, if you use Signal your privacy is preserved.

*(Note, if you are among the small number of people that run alt Android-based operating systems that don't include Google libraries, we implement the battery-destroying push option, and hope you have ways to navigate.)

Be paranoid in your estimation of how much privacy you have, but diligent in your efforts to get more of it for everyone.

Cynicism is a self-fulfilling prophesy. If everything's bad then there's no reason to care, and if nobody cares then everything will be bad.

For things to get better, or not get worse, cynics depend on others to care about those things. To me that feels terribly like freeloading.

Will people read this and stop using the internet or stop caring about privacy?

If the client software is open source with reproducible build, then you don't need to care about what's running on the server. You will never have any means to confirm what's running on the server, because you don't control the server. That is why EE2E was invented.