Comment by Night_Thastus
2 years ago
I've loved Signal. It's been the only consistent way I've been able to send and receive high-quality pictures and videos at all. It's been the only way I've been reliably able to send texts when I'm in an area with poor reception, which is frequent.
The privacy is nice and it's been simple and easy to use.
I hope they stick around. Everyone likes to bash more privacy oriented companies if they aren't absolutely 100% perfect in every single way, but IMO perfect is the enemy of good and Signal has been very good.
The hardest part has been convincing people to use it, and if I have to get people to jump to another one it'll all just fall apart.
> Everyone likes to bash more privacy oriented companies if they aren't absolutely 100% perfect in every single way, but IMO perfect is the enemy of good and Signal has been very good.
Signal has not been good. The absolute least we should expect from any "privacy oriented company" is that they're honest and fully transparent about the data they collect and store, and Signal is none of that. Since they started collecting and forever storing sensitive user data in the cloud they've refused to update their privacy policy to alert people to that data collection.
If you advertise your service to human rights activists, journalists, and whistleblowers whose freedom and/or lives are on the line you owe it to them to be extremely clear about what their risks are by using your service, but Signal outright lies to them in the very first line of their privacy policy.
This isn't "perfect being the enemy of good" this is either a massive dead canary warning people not to use/trust Signal, or it's completely immoral and irresponsible.
Every single time I've seen Signal asked for data in a court case, they've basically handed back a unix timestamp of when the account was created and said "that's all we have". Or it was last access time, I could have misremembered.
Either way, that seems quite good to me.
You're right, that's how it used to be. They still have pages on their website bragging about times when they didn't have anything to turn over because they didn't keep any of it. A while ago that all changed. They started collecting and forever storing in the cloud the exact data those requests were asking for. Lists of everyone you've been contacting, along with your profile data (name, phone number, photo).
https://community.signalusers.org/t/proper-secure-value-secu...
If you're a Signal user and this is the first time you're hearing about this, that should tell you everything you need to know about how trustworthy Signal is.
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I know it's unpopular to say this on here but Signal will never be popular as long as they don't add basic features that all other messaging apps have.
- If you lose your phone or it no longer boots, all your messages are irretrievably lost. There's no way to create backups on iOS. Why the hell can't I enable iCloud backups? I know it breaks privacy in some ways but let me choose the trade off. Put a giant warning if you have to.
- The desktop app is awful and requires signing in again all the time. See the Telegram Desktop app for how to do it better. In my opinion it should be the gold standard for desktop messaging apps
- Desktop app keeps losing message history
As long as Signal treats all messages as if they're so important that even super spies should not be able to read them, and as a result, goofing usability in a way that standard features don't work, I 100% understand that the majority of people won't use it.