Ik hoop dat zulke artikelen wat effect hebben. Ik zit al jaren op signal, maar het is altijd lastig om anderen over te krijgen.
this post was submitted on 26 Jan 2025
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Merk je wel ook dat de laatste tijd er wel opeens weer meerdere mensen Signal nemen? (Als je de notificaties daarvoor aan hebt staan: Settings -> Notifications -> Notify when... Contact joins Signal.)
Het zijn er de afgelopen maanden weer iets meer ja, maar helaas tot nu toen alleen vage bekenden of oud-collega's die ik nooit meer spreek.
Heh, da's bij mij ook, maar in mijn geval is dat omdat vrijwel iedereen die dicht bij me staat het al heeft :P
Ik heb het wel eens geprobeerd, maar sommige mensen vinden het heel moeilijk/vervelend om iets anders dan WhatsApp te gebruiken blijkbaar. Ik prefereer veiligere services zoals Signal ook, maar ik heb inmiddels wel geleerd dat het ook heel vervelend is om absoluut te weigeren WhatsApp te gebruiken. Ik heb op de studie meerdere keren gehad dat mensen absoluut voet bij stuk houden, de één wilde absoluut geen WhatsApp en de andere weigerde Signal of Telegram te gebruiken omdat hij niet "al die apps op z'n telefoon wilde". Toen konden we dus gewoon niet efficiënt communiceren. Ik wilde ook liever geen WhatsApp, maar het is tenminste nog end2end encrypted.
Ja, afhankelijk van de offers die je zelf wil brengen is het iig geïnstalleerd hebben, zodat mensen die er wel om geven je iig via Signal kunnen bereiken, al een prima stap.
Ja lijkt me ook. Ik ben momenteel zelf vrij flexibel. Als iemand een nog veiligere app zou gebruiken dan zou ik ook die installeren. Zolang het maar geen Facebook messenger oid is, want dat vertrouw ik niet meer.
Ik ben letterlijk afgelopen week begonnen met het aankondigen dat ik binnenkort stop met WhatsApp en dat mensen mij kunnen bereiken via de (fysieke) post, email, Discord en inderdaad Signal.
Signal heb ik al enkele jaartjes (sinds 2022), maar nooit intensief gebruikt. Maar daar wil ik dus verandering in brengen dus heb ik besloten om inderdaad te wisselen binnenkort.
Lekker bezig! SMS en bellen is waarschijnlijk ook nog altijd een optie :)
Sorry to pollute this thread with my heretic use of the English language. I just wanted to add that any valid criticism against WhatsApp can be identically transposed to Signal: both platforms are centralized and rest in the controlling hands of a single entity, which may, on a whim, change the "social contract" under which it operates and ultimately deceives its users down the road. This is especially significant since operating at such a large scale puts an exponential (financial, technical, organizational, ...) pressure on the service.
Long story short, amongst the alternatives to this model, the most practical one is the federated model, where, like email, different accounts providers (such as hotmail, gmail, corp.com, ...) provide service to their users and broker messages to their recipients onto the larger network ([email protected] can send messages to [email protected]). XMPP is a good example of that, and NLNet happens to regularly sponsor initiatives which, over the years, have made XMPP a compelling alternative to centralized services, Signal and WhatsApp included.
any valid criticism against WhatsApp can be identically transposed to Signal
There's plenty of criticism that only applies to WhatsApp:
- Your social graph is visible to Meta,
- other metadata is unencrypted,
- it's controlled by a for-profit company,
- and that company already has its fingers in way too much of our communication infrastructure,
- and that company seems to be kowtowing to a (foreign, for some of us) government with ethics in direct conflict with some my own, more than they are legally required to.
I'm not against XMPP, Matrix, or whatever, but let's not pretend that Signal is not a significant improvement, and one that actually has a shot at success here.
Without delving into too many details, those presumed benefits of Signal matter very little in practice:
-
Signal, just like WhatsApp, is centralized: as brokers of your messages, they do know your social graph. In the case of Signal, they "pinky swear" not to look at it, but that's not a technically enforceable guarantee (impossible by design). The same applies to metadata: Signal can absolutely infer from your usage patterns (frequency, time, volume, …) the nature of your social graph, or if you are rather at work or at home, in a romance or not. Signal can absolutely tell where you are based on your IP, or the device you are using. Worse, while they swear not look, not to care and not to log any of that, just by relying on third-party services and running in the cloud, they expose all this metadata to less trustworthy parties who will do the caring and logging as they are mandated by law.
-
Nothing that can be said (or even proven) today about Signal is evidence that the same will remain true in the future. Signal can figure that it costs a lot to operate and might seek other financing schemes. Or its developers can be compelled by law enforcement to alter the service without public disclosure. It all boils down to "nothing is eternal" and while we can't tell when the demise of Signal will occur, history proves it's inevitable, and on this path it might turn as unlikeable as you find WhatsApp to be today.
The only way forward I see is to break away from the centralized model: by design, it can't guarantee your privacy ; by operating principle, it can't guarantee its sustainability.
Signal can update the client to reveal your social graph, sure, but right now, Signal technically cannot know your social graph. And there's two additional layers that make that more likely, which is incentives: being a non-profit, they have no shareholders that would push them to try to look into them, and their primary selling point being privacy, they also have more to lose by doing so. Neither of those apply to WhatsApp. Oh, and a third one: they'd have been in contempt of court, which specifically requested access to such data, and Signal did not provide it because they were not able to.
(I will also say that, in a decentralised communication system, you are reliant on every party you communicate with, and the tools they use, to not expose such data about you either. It's not a panacea.)
Again, it my not be as big a step forward as you'd like, but it's utterly ridiculous to claim that this is not a way forward.
And given that it's not unlikely that larger steps forward may not be possible at all, or would be reliant on us collectively taking smaller steps forward first, I would definitely reconsider putting active effort into discouraging Signal use. Especially if you're not putting at least a multitude more effort into discouraging use of the incumbents.
Signal is nog steeds centralized. Zodra investeerders opdrogen en ze hun servers sluiten is de app niet meer te gebruiken. Een decentrale app zoals https://delta.chat zal veel langer meegaan.
Signal heeft geen investeerders (en kan als non-profit geen winst uitkeren).
Maar inderdaad, ze hebben wel geld nodig, dus donaties zijn geen slecht idee.