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 :)
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If they don’t care about privacy and security, they aren’t wrong
This is exactly the problem with Signal. I used to use it a long time ago, but they progressively made it worse. Finally they got rid of SMS, and refused to back down to the outrage. I looked back at the history of a messaging service that got worse with every update and switched to the default Google messenger, because it can do both SMS and encrypted messaging.
Why would you want SMS in Signal? The whole point of Signal is to be secure. SMS is not secure.
Proprietary messenger programs, even if they do encrypt your messages, probably do so in a way that allows the vendor and the government to read them.
Because I don’t want to have sixteen different messaging apps on my phone. While privacy and security are important to me, I’m also only so willing to put up shit user experience.
The reason I downloaded Signal in the first place was specifically because it could do both SMS and encrypted messaging. Then, over the years every new change either removed features I found useful (individual colors for each chat) or added ones that were just a distraction or actively bad (stickers, stories, PIN).
When they got rid of SMS and refused to back down, despite the outcry, I had no reason to keep it.
I’m not really understanding why this is an issue. Can you explain?
Because I simply don’t want that in my life? Why have a more complicated life when I can have simpler one?
Because the “simpler life” involves allowing spooks and marketers to read your conversations and use the data to brainwash and/or Minority Report you.
You are under attack. Defend yourself.
I’m well aware, and so is everyone else. And yet we’re all so apathetic about it that we’re not willing to put up with immediate annoyances to safeguard against vauge future potential problems.
The selling point for Signal for me was that I could tell people that it could do both SMS and encrypted messages, so they didn’t have to add an extra messaging app. It was literally encryption for normies.
Without that convenience? Fuck it. There’s no immediate value to me or any other normal person.
I personally don’t trust any E2EE, where the client is not FOSS. Like, how can I verify it’s:
I was upset about the SMS thing as well. I also switched to Google messenger app on my phone for SMS/RCS. While they do have encryption in transit, I’m pretty sure it’s not encrypted at rest on the server side like signal is.
I have been using Signal for years and have not noticed it getting worse. Instead, I’ve noticed that it’s much more reliable about timely notifications than it was a few years ago.
I never much cared about it being able to do SMS or not. I got used to the idea that it was necessary to have multiple apps to talk to everyone in the early 2000s PC instant messenger era; there were some multi-service apps, but that was never a stable situation.
Pidgin and Trillian were both fantastic stable solutions back then, and it’s be real fucking nice to have that today, but everyone’s got their hand out to steal your data and offer you free services for the trouble and they don’t want to share.
God I loved trillian. Fuck knows what it was doing with my data though.
🤣