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.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
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- 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
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The problem is that there is no way to verify any of this. You’re just putting trust into people operating this service. That’s not how security is supposed to work.
the protocol is secure, but privacy is this issue
I’d argue that this is part of the overall protocol design. The e2e encryption aspect of the protocol seems sound, but the system as implemented overall is problematic.
Strictly you’re having to trust the build of the client rather than the people running the server. If the client doesn’t send/leak the information to the server, the people running the server can’t do anything with it. It’s definitely still a concern, and, if I’m going to use a hosted messaging app, I’d much rather see the client built and published by a different group, and ideally compile it myself. Apart from that I’m not sure there’s any way to satisfy your concerns without building and running the server and client yourself.
The problem is that a phone number is required to make an account, and that’s a unique identifier for each person using Signal.
The government can then know you use Signal. This may be problematic in heavily autocratic regimes, but besides those, what threat scenario are you arguing for here? The Sealed Sender concept disallows building a social graph. However, you can utilize a VPN to mask your point of origin or, if necessary, even use a burner number. Under the worst case scenario that the US gov takes over the whole AWS infrastructure and tries to correlate connections to users, there’s still very high information entropy. At that point, we’re talking about the US gov as a targeting threat actor. If that’s your opponent, you shouldn’t use everyday customer electronics or applications anyway. That’s some spy shit, even domestic activists won’t fall under that much scrutiny.
The government can know you use Signal, and know who your contacts are, and can correlate all the data they have on your and your contacts to see if any of it makes your whole group of contacts of interest. So, yeah it’s pretty concerning for people living in autocratic regimes like the US. Meanwhile, the sealed sender concept is just trust me bro because nobody aside from people who are actually operating the server know what it’s doing. The fact that people in this thread have so much trouble understanding that any data that gets leaked has to be assumed to be in the hands of a bad actor is phenomenal. Signal is proof that vast majority of people don’t understand the basics of privacy and security, and they don’t actually care. It’s just pure ideology for them.