This is the core of the issue, and it’s wild how many people don’t get it.

Your phone number is metadata. And people who think metadata is “just” data or that cross-referencing is some kind of sci-fi nonsense, are fundamentally misunderstanding how modern surveillance works.

By requiring phone numbers, Signal, despite its good encryption, inherently builds a social graph. The server operators, or anyone who gets that data, can see a map of who is talking to whom. The content is secure, but the connections are not.

Being able to map out who talks to whom is incredibly valuable. A three-letter agency can take the map of connections and overlay it with all the other data they vacuum up from other sources, such as location data, purchase histories, social media activity. If you become a “person of interest” for any reason, they instantly have your entire social circle mapped out.

Worse, the act of seeking out encrypted communication is itself a red flag. It’s a perfect filter: “Show me everyone paranoid enough to use crypto.” You’re basically raising your hand.

So, in a twisted way, Signal being a tool for private conversations, makes it a perfect machine for mapping associations and identifying targets. The fact that it operates using a centralized server located in the US should worry people far more than it seems to.

The kicker is that thanks to gag orders, companies are legally forbidden from telling you if the feds come knocking for this data. So even if Signal’s intentions are pure, we’d never know how the data it collects is being used. The potential for abuse is baked right into the phone-number requirement.

Yup, very similar stuff.

ha!

I’m sure that’s what was going through the mind of that one downvoter 🤣

Radicle is really worth checking out https://radicle.xyz/

The only people who know what the server stores are the people running it.

I’m simply explaining why it’s difficult for people to move from existing networks.

Oh yeah the whole thing is a mess. It kind of blows my mind that we still don’t have a single common protocol that at least the open source world agrees on. Like there is a more or less fixed set of things chat apps need to do, we should be able to agree on something akin to ActivityPub here as a base.

The explanation is obvious. The phone numbers are a personally identifiable network of connections that is available to the people operating Signal servers. If this information is shared with the US government, then they can easily correlate this information with all the other data they have. For example, if somebody is identified as a person of interest then anybody they want to have secure communications would also be of interest.

One of the big problems nowadays is proprietary protocols. Back in the day, you could have a single client that could talk to different networks. Today you have to run a bunch of separate apps, and what’s worse is that a lot of them are built with stuff like Electron that’s resource hungry.

It’s network effects. People have other friends on the network who have their own friends on the network, and so on. Leaving the network means convincing a critical mass of your network to leave along with you.

Oh for sure, I find most tech news articles are just painful to read nowadays. I also distinctly remember this was not the case before.

I don’t think they actually understand that Mastodon is a network in a traditional sense that works the way the internet was meant to operate before the corporate takeover. People have been so conditioned that the internet is just 5 corps in a trench coat, that they don’t have the cognitive tools to engage with something like the fediverse.

Exactly, even is Signal is secure across the wire, if you have a kit like Pegasus on your phone then it can just capture keyboard input, and screen output, entirely bypassing Signal itself.

I mean this has already been happening for years with stuff like Google home and Alexa.

https://ludwig.guru/blog/the-jesters-privilege-or-the-power-of-being-unheard

I thought we were talking about China as opposed to autocratic western regimes.

No, it’s because lemmy.ml doesn’t tolerate racism the way you fash instance does.

You can literally access the fediverse from China. It’s frankly incredible that somebody can be this ignorant. 🤣

My comment likewise touches on the fact that people living under western regimes are disappeared in regular course of business. In fact, there’s far more evidence for people disappearing without any reasonable grounds in the west than there are in China.

lmfao people literally get arrested for social media posts in UK and Germany

The distinction with China is in actual human rights like people being able to afford housing, food, and education. People not having to worry about losing their job and ending up on the street or being able to retire in dignity.

Having supposed freedumbs is literally what y’all have been braying made the West different from Russia and China.

Old enough to remember how Europeans smugly thought that they lived in some sort of an enlightened and free society.

it really is

The point is that I, and many other people, have answered these questions many times. If you’re personally ignorant on the subject, then spend the time to educate yourself. You can start with the materials I’ve provided you. It’s not my job to educate you. I perfect having interactive discussion with people who understand the subject they’re discussing and want to have a discussion in good faith. It’s very transparent that you are not.

I’ll let you have the last word here which you so desperately need.

Bye.

I just love how you keep acting like these questions haven’t been answered time and again. As if you came up with some novel line of questioning nobody has ever thought before. Go read a book for once in your life. Here’s one you can start with. https://welshundergroundnetwork.cymru/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/blackshirts-and-reds-by-michael-parenti.pdf

And here’s how people who actually live in China characterize their modern government in one or two words. If you spent as much time educating yourself on the subjects you wish to debate instead of making a clown of yourself in public, you wouldn’t have to ask questions like this and em brass yourself.

• https://www.newsweek.com/most-china-call-their-nation-democracy-most-us-say-america-isnt-1711176
• https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Asia-Pacific/2021/0218/Vilified-abroad-popular-at-home-China-s-Communist-Party-at-100
• https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-06-26/which-nations-are-democracies-some-citizens-might-disagree
• https://web.archive.org/web/20230511041927/https://6389062.fs1.hubspotusercontent-na1.net/hubfs/6389062/Canva images/Democracy Perception Index 2023.pdf
• https://www.tbsnews.net/world/china-more-democratic-america-say-people-98686
• https://web.archive.org/web/20201229132410/https://en.news-front.info/2020/06/27/studies-have-shown-that-china-is-more-democratic-than-the-united-states-russia-is-nearby-and-ukraine-is-at-the-bottom/

You’re like a living embodiment of the Dunning-Kruger effect.

🙄

I’m not a debate pervert. I’ve made my point clearly here already. I don’t need to convince you of anything. The fact that you use Trump and Stalin in the same sentence shows profound ignorance on your part. There is no point attempting to have a discussion with people who have strong opinions on subjects they have no understanding of. I’ll leave you with what the CIA had to say on the subject. I would hope you’d use this as an opportunity to educate yourself, but I know that you will not.

https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP80-00810A006000360009-0.pdf

The difference is that we don’t celebrate it or make excuses for it.

Except you do constantly make excuses for it, as you brilliantly demonstrated here. You want to pretend that you support more freedoms than communists, but in practice you just champion your own set of capitalist values.

The difference is that communists accept the need for censorship and are open about why some ideas need to be suppressed. However, liberals hypocritically claim to stand for free speech and claim this is the key differentiating factor between liberal democracies and socialist systems, but only tolerate speech that they deem acceptable.

Funny how freeze peach sublimates directly into censorship vapor the moment liberals lose their cultural hegemony.

Homomorphic encryption has been around for a while now, but practical applications have been limited so far.

thank you for gracing us with an example of how a thirteen year old understands the world

Clearly, trolling is your passion as evidenced by this very thread.

Everyone should delete these spyware tools from their devices.

basically, don’t ever install meta apps on any of your devices and use a browser that has good tab isolation, always use Firefox would be my advice

Let’s say it is, so what? The actual question to ask whether the text conveys useful information to the reader or not. Whether LLM was used to make the content more readable is completely irrelevant.

Does it identify people like Kid Starver who are murdering the disabled on an industrial scale?

What specifically isn’t true?