Comment by xurukefi
6 years ago
Funny. My favorite example to demonstrate why people do absolutely not care about privacy is Signal. In terms of privacy it is a superior messenger to Whatsapp and Telegram, but in terms of usability and convenience it is horrible and that is the only reason why it is not used. Convenience and usability will beat security and privacy every single time. I know it sucks, but it is what it is.
Signal isn't particularly inconvenient, but it is ugly compared to every other mainstream app -- and looks matter.
The reason I stopped recommending Signal to anyone is that its message delivery is abysmal compared to everything else. When I was using it regularly, maybe 5% of messages wouldn't be delivered right away; they'd get there a few days later, or up to a week later. I don't understand that failure mode, but after having a panic over a pet sitter not getting some instructions (the pets were fine) I tried out Telegram; never had one delivery failure in about 8 months of heavy use.
It's a shame, because I liked Signal.
The other showstopper Signal has is also a UI thing; you cannot set a contact to "never use Signal". Which means, if you get one of your family to start using it, and they don't like it and uninstall it, you're forever forcing Signal to "send via SMS" to that contact. They can "unregister" but you can't do that for them.
I had two or three people who I'd send a message to, not hear a response, 30 minutes later realize that it went to their nonexistent signal account, reset as SMS and got an instant reply. Very irritating for a messaging app and so easily solved.
Using Signal isn't all that inconvenient, it's just not a pretty app. It does what it advertises, it sends messages, photos, voice memos with a few extras like disappearing messages. Sure, it's missing the 'frilly' features like Samsung and Apple have in their messengers but it gets it's job done considerably well. I think Signal is actually a better example of an application where the privacy/convenience trade off is rather mild. There are no requirements to authenticate each time you open it, you can choose weather or not to allow in-app screenshots, it still sends SMS (on Android) so it can replace your built in SMS without having to switch between secure and non-secure apps for messaging.
I hear you. I use Signal. Despite having only negative experiences interacting with their development team on Github.
But I've used it since the TextSecure days and will continue to do so until the company is compromised. ~80% of my friends use it to contact me, at my request, many also since the TextSecure days when usability concerns were even more of an issue.
Perhaps we are both living in bubbles?
As the sibling says, Signal really isn't that bad for convenience. I didn't have much difficulty switching my family to it. I suspect use of messaging apps other than Signal has little to do with the convenience delta and more to do with the network size delta.
Excuse my ignorance, but isn't Whatsapp encrypted end to end? The only information available to Facebook is meta-data, who I was sending to, what time, response time, etc.
Is there anything I'm missing? If not, how does Signal deal w/ meta-data?