Privacy

31279 readers

805 users here now

A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.

Some Rules

Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
Don't promote proprietary software
Try to keep things on topic
If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
Be nice :)

Related communities

Chat rooms

[Matrix/Element]Dead
Discord

much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)

founded 4 years ago

MODERATORS

How good you feel good about your privacy using apps such as Signal? (lemmy.wtf)

submitted 1 day ago by chappedafloat@lemmy.wtf to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

90 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Convincing people to use apps such as Signal is hard work and most can't be convinced. But with those you manage to convince, do you feel happy to talk to them on Signal?

The problem is these people use Signal on Android/IOS which can't be trusted and IOS has recently been in the news for having a backdoor. And it has also been revealed that american feds are able to read everyone's push notifications and they do this as mass surveillance.

So not only do you have to convince people to use Signal which is an incredibly difficult challenge. You also have to convince them to go into settings to disable message and sender being included in the push notifications. And then there's the big question is the Android and IOS operating systems are doing mass surveillance anyway. And many people find it taking a lot of effort to type on the phone so they install Signal on the computer which is a mac or Windows OS.

So I don't think I feel comfortable sending messages in Signal but it's better than Whatsapp.

These were some thoughts to get the discussion started and set the context.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] 211@sopuli.xyz 6 points 22 hours ago (2 children)

I don't know how the Play Store version does push notifications, but Molly, and I think the apk from their site, work just fine on degoogled phones without Google services.

I don't remember what name it has, but missing it breaks push notifications on most "normal" apps. Many FLOSS ones are coded to have their own methods that don't transmit data to Google, and it appears at least some versions of Signal do too.

My threat model doesn't include state level actors taking an active interest in me, so for my purposes Signal would be secure enough, if only I got people to adopt even it.

[–] JameUwU@lemmy.ml 3 points 12 hours ago* (last edited 11 hours ago) (1 children)

APK and play Store versions are identical. Signal runs a check for GMS/GFS and if that Check returns true uses firebase. If not it uses WebSocket. Signal-FOSS on TwinHelix removes GMS/GSF dependencies though, and Molly-UP actually integrates a way for you to use your own push Server.

Edit: Also if you use MicroG without push notifications enabled default Signal is just broken last I checked.

[–] jim3692@discuss.online 1 points 4 hours ago

I have Signal and microG with push notifications. Signal still uses websocket on my device. So, I guess it would be fine without microG push.