Under Meredith Whittaker, Signal Is Out to Prove Surveillance Capitalism Wrong
www.wired.comOn its 10th anniversary, Signal’s president wants to remind you that the world’s most secure communications platform is a nonprofit. It’s free. It doesn’t track you or serve you ads. It pays its engineers very well. And it’s a go-to app for hundreds of millions of people.
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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.
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Not that the action against Telegram is right, but there’s a big difference between what Signal and Telegram is doing.
Indeed there is, one is an op funded by US intelligence agencies and the other is a platform that the US has no control over.
Telegram is available on F-Droid. Signal is not. Whatever is Signal doing, it’s pretty bad.
The folks at F-Droid have said that Signal would certainly qualify, but Signal doesn’t want multiple channels out there. F-Droid is just honoring their wishes.
Are you developing your opinions based on vibes or have you actually audited their software yourself (you are free to do so both client and federation server code)?
If you audited it, have you produced an actual report with metrics and points of reference for your data points?
Doesn’t take away the fact that not being on F-droid is a huge issue and says a lot about how much they care about privacy and security.
This person has been running around spreading FUD in every post about this
It’s what Ive come to expect from the lemmy.ml instance and I finally blocked the entire instance.
But you still post in lemmy.ml/privacy?
It’s actually sad, even though I’m a libertarian, tankies and in general marxists could have made a good input into our future. But if they can believe in Telegram being secure because of vibes and not even doing basic research, they’ve already lost.
Heeey I am also a libertarian, I just tend towards left libertarian. Back to the point of discussion, I find it difficult to ha e a meaningful conversation with the tankies or in general anyone from lemmy.ml . The discussions tend to lack any real data and feel entirely vibe based OR it’s apologist bullshit for Russia.
Like it’s cool if you like communism and have a philosophy based around why you think it’ll help humanity. I can politely disagree but still listen and discuss. It’s quite another to just be a complete dipshit and say “Ukraine had the invasion coming” (actual quote I’ve seen).
I’m actually sympathetic to anyone having an ideology not to help their identity, but trying to imagine a structure that works.
Ancaps are expected to be good in that regard, tankies are expected to be bad in that regard, but in general there are good and bad people in any group. I’ve met almost (the premise of racial difference in quality is still wrong obviously) reasonable Nazis, and not alt-rights at that, but real honest Nazis.
I’ve been excited about Trotskyism at some point, because while there are problems with their proposed ideal state (which is similar to what’s described in Norbert Wiener’s “Cybernetics”), they have a proposed mechanism and it’s been even tested in Rojava (their bigger issue is with armed apes around them though, and also with the USA abandoning them after not needing them against ISIS).
Would you have more info on the differences? I was wondering the same thing, but I don’t know enough about Telegram to compare
She responds to this point in the interview.
Signal always responds to authorities when they ask for data, and they give them all they have: the day they registered, their phone number and the timestamp they last used the app.
Telegram has unencrypted channels of drug dealing, and what I heard is a lot of illegal porn too. The authorities want information on certain users there and Telegram doesn’t comply. This is directly against the law Signal is not breaking, because they always send all the data they have to the law enforcement.
Is it time stamp of last usage, or time stamp of all messages?
Hilarious that it’s impossible. They don’t even horde your data.
Telegram is a propaganda weapon in some sense, between two worldviews - one is “a good service doesn’t require trust, because they physically can’t sell you”, another is “a good service you can trust because they won’t sell you”. And Telegram helps the latter.
So frankly - kill it with fire. Sadly I’m in Russia and everybody uses it here.
while not wrong context matters, US social media companies also enable human, weapons, and drug trafficking. they play a role in a few genocides too.
but the western regime does not care.
All of the illegal stuff like that that I’ve seen around on social media always linked to telegram channels. Most of the time what you see on regular social media are bots advertising the telegram channels, where the real people are at
But they give their data when the officials ask. That is all that matters. And I seriously hope none of us uses Telegram or WhatsApp to any discussions. Use Signal because that is so far pretty unbreakable.
Telegram is already in the hands of that tiny Russian old man and WhatsApp is owned by a lizard.
Yeah, try telling your family, friends, colleagues, therapist to use Signal.
Did so years ago. Everybody uses it from my family and friends. I’ve had a very active group chat there for eight years with friends. My mom uses it actively, even calls me using Signal. My partner knows it is the best chat app and actively uses it.
I just asked ages ago for everybody to switch to signal, they valuated the features and for a group chat automatically deleted messages and strong encryption were really interesting for everybody. Now we can shoot shit in a group chat without needing to worry that the logs are stored somewhere forever.
Yeah, I’m trying to convince everyone to start using signal before the slide towards fascism turns into a drop
Same. I also sell the fact that it works xPlatform perfectly, so no more Android/SMS/iMessage fuckery happening.
I’m no authority on it but from what I’ve read it seems to have more to do with the social features of telegram where lots of content is being shared, both legal and illegal. Signal doesn’t have channels that support hundreds of thousands of people at once, nor media hosting to match.
And it’s sad that it doesn’t. Because that’s why people use Telegram.
Media hosting - we-ell, I suppose something similar to bittorrent (or just sharing encrypted files over bittorrent) would do to back such a system?
Telegram’s channels are like blogs, they have reactions and comment links leading to a groupchat associated with a channel.
It’s basically a social network in an instant messenger format.
Telegram is socially , in terms of finding a market niche, the smartest thing of what’s happened in the Internet recently. Durov really is a good businessman.
Right, the French authorities are going to present evidence that this dude was aware of specific illegal activity and refuse to comply with a legal warrant involving said actively, making him guilty of obstruction at best, and possibly conspiracy. Signal complies with warrants, they just don’t have anyone’s keys. Telegram has everyone’s keys, and theoretically could turn them over but they refuse. That’s a huge difference from a legal perspective.
Thank you. I’m going to restate your explanation to be sure I’ve got it:
It’s easier, but Telegram’s authors are from Russia. They psychologically can’t accept that “never have the keys” thing. They want to have control and they want to be able to tell “yes” to the investigator, possibly for something in return.