this post was submitted on 15 Sep 2021
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Privacy
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uh oh
edit: seriously tho, ๐ writeup
Haha thanks. Its impossible for it not to be controversial, for some reason I've found signal fans to be more fanatical in their loyalty to it than most advocates of other privacy apps.
It's because all criticism I've seen of Signal is at best circumstantial, and have nothing concrete despite the app being open source, with reproducible builds, under a ton of international scrutiny. I have read part of their code. I have understood the protocol itself for some of my classes.
It's one of the rare FLOSS project that is actually good enough in terms of UX to actually reach popular adoption. We shouldn't shoot it down.
On the side there are some concerning security issues with Matrix which I detail here. Signal is much much more attentive to the security of their implementation.
Frankly, these are the exact same defenses you hear of companies like apple, who also run centralized services, yet their userbases are utterly convinced of their privacy.
You can't just say things like "the evidence against them is circurmstancial", for centralized services. It all boils down to "gut feelings", rather than the reproducibility requirements that the self hosted solutions must pass. Don't trust these companies by default, and never take a pretty ui or branding polish as a stand in for trust.
Phone number ids, and centralized, us based services wouldn't be acceptable for any privacy oriented chat app. Signal also shouldn't get a pass.
It's a good article :) hope you don't have to delete comments, but by the looks of it, they're very civil.
yeah, i didn't mean that anything bad is going on, just that it's a somewhat controversial topic and heated debate is taking place hehe