this post was submitted on 15 Sep 2021
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Privacy
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Since when does Zuckerberg endorses Signal?
The best way to do private/secure messenging is to do it similarly to the least private and secure messaging protocol in use?
This entire section completely ignores that Signal isn't designed to talk to random people. It's designed to talk to your friends/family/coworkers, who most likely already have your phone number. It makes it super easy to migrate. There's no way my grandma would be able to add me on briar...
It also completely ignores the work that is being put into adding username that would allow you to talk to people without having to give them your phone number.
It also completely ignores Signal's history. Initially it started as a way to encrypt SMS, so phone number were not an option anyway.
Except that they don't have the message senders thanks to sealed sender
Payment in Signal has been a major request since the migration from WhatsApp. In multiple countries WhatsApp has a payment feature that is hugely popular. At least they try to improve on such feature by using crypto to make it private, while not using proof of work which destroys the environment. And it's not like they have actually shipped it. It's only in the beta channel in a few countries...
Yeah, it's obviously because of that, and Chinese apps are a heaven of privacy and zero state censorship.
Federation increases censorship resistance. I do not think it necessarily decreases privacy, although having metadata strewn across multiple servers may be a risk. Still, I think the comparison with email is a bit of a strawn man argument, since it is not only the federated nature of email which makes it easy to surveil but also the fact it is unencrypted by default.
Moreover, email these days is concentrating in the hands of a small number of providers (gmail, etc).
XMPP seems a lot more distributed at this point in time.
Federation makes it much harder to keep metadata private, though you could technically achieve the level of privacy found in Signal, it's not easy.
In practice, Signal is a lot better at protecting your metadata than Matrix and XMPP.
Now that matrix has a lot of different clients and implementation, of would be super hard for them to implement something like Sealed Sender, which Signal was able to deploy very easily. I find it very unlikely that matrix will end up fixing its privacy issues. While Signal will be able to evolve and fix them. They are currently working on usernames for example.