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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Nice. I don’t think I need this but its good to have options
Good idea for monetization.
Completely fine with that, I agree
Cloud backups, for security!
If anyone is actually going to get that right in a mainstream product, it will probably be Signal.
Year according to a wiki page on the unofficial Signal wiki the backup will not be directly linked to the user “It appears that backups will not be directly linkable to a user. Authentication for operations against a given backup will use zero-knowledge proofs.”.
Finally a good approach at raising money (other than donations)
I don’t mind paying a fair price, for a service, so they should go for it. I use both Signal and Telegram, and I would pay for Telegram too, if the price was more fair…
Don’t use Telegram, let alone pay for it. So many red flags with Telegram.
Feel free to list them - with evidence and not just prejudice…?
There’s end-to-end encryption. It’s fine that you can chose what needs to be private, and what doesn’t need to be.
There could be several reasons as to why the servers are not OS. Why do you need that part to be OS? Seriously, why?
Oh, so your problem with Telegram is, that it had some issues in the past, just like EVERY other app in the beginning? Nice one. :-)
So, let’s summarize.
Woot?! (not op),
Its totally fine that you like telegram, but you can do that while acknowledging others preferences
So far, don’t you think that you really would know, if government was involved in any way that didn’t involve crime fighting? Do you prefer an app, where crime roam free? Is that your issue? That it doesn’t?
AFAIK it’s you and two others, who don’t acknowledge my preferences… So please consider following your own advice!
That is not what I said. Please take a deep breath, maybe go outside for a minute, and read my reply again.
First of all, you injected yourself in my debate with another person. You do it by answering for that person, which mean, you lie by default, since you don’t know that persons answers. Then you say there are no end-to-end encryption by default, but that depends on what you use it for. Calls are encrypted by default.
But nice to know that you really didn’t have any serious red flags. Now it would be nice to hear from the person I was originally debating with…
Ah sorry. I thought you were here on lemmy for an open discussion and polite, good-faith arguments, not just trolling and name-calling. My bad.
Price is fair but features aren’t worth it.
You contradict yourself. You can’t say that the price is fair, for something that doesn’t have the features that the price should cover.
As long as they leave the local backup option that sounds like a good idea to me.
All of my signal conversations have auto expiry
Do people really use their conversation logs for things? Are you often searching your conversational logs?
Outside of corporate compliance issues I can’t imagine the workflow for most people
Yes, and yes.
“I said this was happening 3 weeks ago. Here’s the literal text of me sending it to you and you saying ‘Okay thanks’ in reply.”
Shuts down an argument real quick.
I never set auto expiry and often search messages. Sometimes it’s because I want to find a specific fact or datum from two years ago; other times it’s just for a reminder of a memory. On occasion, if the history wasn’t there, people might remember something important differently.
History search is great when you have a lot of friends and poor memory.
Me and my wife and wife sends information, pictures , whatever. I often search my messages for stuff
Yes, and yes. But most of it’s because I’ve moved all communication over to it.
If I have anything that shouldn’t stick around it doesn’t stick around, If I need my grocery list from last month it’s there though.
That said, I really don’t have any interest in backups. It’s an ephemeral stream at best that is there when I need it. And there are parts of it disappear when they’re no longer needed.
The days where we presumed we could safely bitch about things to our friends over social media are clearly gone and privacy is of ultimate importance.
Pretend it’s 1984, and you won’t get yourself in trouble.
My grocery list is its own signal group chat with other members of the household
Same, We do more than groceries though, It’s kind of fun anybody that needs anything just pops it in there
I have never searched for a message ever.
You are right, I don’t really search my messages that much. Most important conversion is going by email for most people still.
Most Whatsapp users (my parents) want to keep logs of everything, its become normalised.
Though the same I like my conversations disappear when I need to reinstall Signal.
out of curiosity: what duration do you have?
My default is set to 1 week.
Enough for conversational context
deleted by creator
Good to see they have some reasonable revenue streams lined up.
Makes sense., something as huge and expensive as Signal can’t run entirely on donations.
Sure it can, just look at Wikipedia. But it’s probably a good idea to have some alternate forms of revenue generation.
Wikipedia has way more donors, since it’s basically the only one of its kind. There is no Big Tech alternative to Wikipedia, so everyone just uses it by default. There are lots of other messengers though, so Signal isn’t the default choice.
Wikipedia has a lot more donors, but also their costs are probably cheaper than Signal. They mostly host text and decently compressed images, Signal uses way more bandwidth and people share high quality videos and other huge files. The servers are very expensive, there were articles estimating their cost to be around $50M per year.
At least this time they do it out in the open, not like with the MobileCoin integration.
Like cloud backup on their server or a subscription just to export the files to store offline?
I think it’s cloud backups.
In the GitHub commit it’s called Renew your Signal Backups subscription.
Signal backups are an issue. They keep growing. I need to look into a solution sooner or later that isn’t just buying a phone with more space. I’d like to find ways to reduce the size and keep managing the backups myself, but that’s gonna take time. If they offer a secure, private, and affordable service, I’d prolly just redirect my donations to that.
It would be nice if the backups were split into time-indexed files so I could move the old parts to cheap external hard drives and only keep recent backups on my expensive phone storage.
Agreed. Would be great if we could save old backups on a server and search it from a client, instead of the current option of keeping everything in one local backup. The latter is a real problem after a while if you have contacts that like sending videos.
I imagine search of server backups would be pretty hard to do securely. Better management of locally stored media would be nice, but you can sort by size, export, and delete media from inside the settings.
I was actually unaware of those features and thinking of an over engineered solution. Good lookin out!
honestly thats why I don’t like signal and simplex for people who send lots of images. something server-based is much more suitable for them, like Matrix. that is, if their apps were more stable. there’s also the security about metadata, but for most people that’s probably not a huge concern
Glad to see they are establishing useful streams of revenue
I, however, will continue using Molly in combination with Syncthing
If this feature rolls out but you can’t pay for it. You can always use Molly (fork of signal). If you can support the project than do it. But if you can’t than don’t force your self
Switching to Molly won’t necessarily give you free cloud backups. Someone will still need to pay for the storage costs.
I was saying local backup
Ah, misunderstood your post. I think regular Signal still supports local backup. Doubt they’ll remove it when they add this.
Maybe lets see what happens
I have no issue with this, I personally wouldn’t use it but I get that they need to make money (which is why i have a recurrent donation every month).
If this helps them to do that, then so be it