Comment by samth
6 years ago
One frustrating thing about Moxie's original post is that Signal derives huge amounts of value by piggybacking on an existing distributed federated network: the phone system. If phone numbers weren't an existing working identifiers that people had regardless of what OS, carrier, or messaging app, Signal as designed wouldn't work.
People should think harder about how to replicate that experience, instead of how to appropriate it and then abandon it.
In his "The Ecosystem is Moving" talk at CCC, he had many presumptuous and dubious "arguments" but one regarding privacy of phone numbers was that a user's APN would be used to determine their phone number, so there was no point in trying to keep phone numbers private.
This fails to account for the possibility of not using the cellular network. With unlocked smartphones, it is possible to remove the SIM card, clear any APN settings and access WiFi. That can be enough for a messaging app to work.
The only identifier needed for iMessage and FaceTime is a working e-mail address (and only for sign up). No cellular account is required.
That's not the representative experience for most consumers/users. Most people do have a phone number, though, so it's easy enough to bootstrap with.
I might not agree with the phone number thing, but I recognize the tradeoff being made and am willing to begrudgingly accept that for right now, Signal/Moxie are probably making the right call. It's not like they're not moving to fix it anyway.
Also, unless I misunderstood him, the APN bit is referencing push notifications, and he's right - if that's out there, it could identify you not just by phone but by Apple account in general. You realistically can't use Signal without an Apple ID, as you couldn't get it from the store otherwise.
> You realistically can't use Signal without an Apple ID
I do, because I got it and signed up for an account on my Android phone...
Okay, I realize what you're getting at here, but it seriously irks me when people talk as if Apple was the only ecosystem, or even the most popular ecosystem, when it is neither.
I probably don't even need a Google Play Store account if I can find an unmodified APK that's signed by OWS.
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> That's not the representative experience for most consumers/users. Most people do have a phone number, though, so it's easy enough to bootstrap with.
It's a trap most don't realize they are falling in. It's easy to set up things without one time registration step (instead of making a user id and password, just download some client and boom - you are set). But think about it. One time(!) convenience is paid with constant(!) reduction of privacy.
Compare it to one time inconvenience of registration step, that gives you constantly better privacy. I'd say the second is the obvious choice.
And it's easy to sell this "convenience" for the clueless, but it's also evil to do so, because most don't realize what they are paying with. So I blame developers who are proliferating this approach. Unlike many of their users, they know very well what they are doing, and they exploit people's cluelessness and natural preference for convenience.
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"You realistically can't use Signal without an Apple ID, as you couldn't get it from the store otherwise."
Isn't this the issue people are complaining about. They want to install this program without going through an "app store" to get it.
Is it possible to avoid using APNS. Probably it is enabled by default even the user does nothing with her phone and installs no third party apps. What if the user blocks the DNS requests to Apple.
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In the context of this talk, APN means "Apple Push Network", I think. The concern is that even if the service doesn't ask for a phone number directly, it does still have an APN or GCM/FCM push token. Through the push provider, that token can probably be linked to the user's phone number.
> With unlocked smartphones, it is possible to remove the SIM card, clear any APN settings and access WiFi.
If you're willing to do all that, I suppose getting some free VoIP number for registering with Signal (e.g. through Textnow) won't be too much of a hassle?
So you pull a Telegram and create a good alternative to APN/Firebase.
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I believe he was speaking of Apple push notifications and google cloud messaging
>People should think harder about how to replicate that experience, instead of how to appropriate it and then abandon it.
That's great and all, but because Signal takes advantage of that existing network of identifiers, it is able to deliver usable private messaging to many users today. Replacing phone numbers as identifiers is a much harder problem than what Signal has done so far. We shouldn't wait to solve this at some unknown point in the future before offering "huge amounts of value" to users.
The position you're taking, roughly that with limited resources you have to aim for achievable goals and while distributed federated networks are the underlying reason Signal works, it can't try to replace them right now, is totally reasonable, although not everyone will agree. However, that isn't at all what Moxie said. Instead he made no acknowledgement of the distributed nature of the phone system, he suggested that everyone who disagreed lived in the imaginary past, and suggested that his approach was the only sensible one. So I'm not inclined to read it as charitably as I read your comment.
>One frustrating thing about Moxie's original post is that Signal derives huge amounts of value by piggybacking on an existing distributed federated network: the phone system. If phone numbers weren't an existing working identifiers that people had regardless of what OS
oh my sweet summer child.
I hop countries and switch phones every few years. This entire assumption that my identity is tied to a phone number which I will have forever is patently false. Phone numbers are an anachronism.
I sure as hell don't trust an alleged privacy focused messenger that insists on a hard identifier (even if I know how to subvert said identifier for now). When privacy truly matters, signal runs on an emulated phone and a burner number.
Snipped out of context from: https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/
"However, over the past six years, we’ve also seen the user cost of switching between centralized communication services reduced substantially, particularly given the tendency towards addressing with user-owned identifiers like phone numbers."
Does he really believe that phone numbers are user-owned? My phone carrier owns my number. If I'm lucky, I might be able to take it to a new carrier. It's far more likely that I'd drop the number in favor of one in the area code in which I actually live, however.
I own my own domain, and I self-host my own email. I'm not likely to change it for geographical reasons. It has a much stronger tie to me than some string of digits used by an analog voice network from the last century.
The other user cost of switching between centralized services is network effects. If you want to switch from ICQ to AIM, you need to get all your friends to join you.
The ownership of a domain name is not guaranteed - even just in HN there are multiple stories of domains being taken away for questionable reasons.
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