On 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.
People there positing that this is no correct. Granted their info appears to be signal “disclosed” to the feds as part of a court proceed what it collects, which is only apparently when you connect to the server.
Doesnt answer the issue if they could collect your call logs though
My reply from the other thread. People who claim this isn’t true aren’t being honest. The phone number is the key metadata. Meanwhile, nobody outside the people who are actually operating the server knows what it’s doing and what data it retains. Faith based approach to privacy is fundamentally wrong. Any data that the protocol leaks has to be assumed to be available to adversaries.
Furthermore, companies can’t disclose if they are sharing data under warrant. This is why the whole concept of warrant canary exists. Last I checked Signal does not have one.
When you install Signal, it asks for access to your contacts, and says very proudly, “we don’t upload your contacts, it all stays on your phone.”
And then it spams all of your contacts who have Signal installed, without asking your first.
And it shares your phone number with everyone in your contacts who has Signal installed.
And then when you scream ARE YOU removedING KIDDING ME and delete your account and purge the app, guess what? All those people running Signal still have your phone number displayed for them right there in plain text. Deleting your account does not delete the information that the app shared without your permission.
So yeah. Real nice “privacy” app you’ve got there.
Wow didn’t even know about that, what a removed show. It’s so weird how Signal has become a sacred cow in the west now, and you can’t have a rational discussion about its many problems without a whole bunch of trolls piling on saying you should just put faith in Signal unconditionally.
It is a decent app, it does what it says. Daddy can’t read your removed until quantum break encryption.
Real question is whether it is a honeypot to make edgelords feelz good. Strong allegation, no doubt but we are also in the grey zone it seems. Based on that, you have to assume, they are farming the info at least to the security apparatus.
phone number isn’t just any metadata; it is the anchoring data around which the rest of metadata is collected, and it is also connected to govt/corporate verified real identity.
why would anyone even claim to offer privacy around such an anchor ?
Exactly, especially when we’re talking about the US government that has access to all the data from other large US based media companies like Google and Meta. We know this for a fact thanks to Snowden leaks. Once you have a phone number, you know the identity of the person, and you can trivially cross reference all the other data to see if that person is of interest. And thanks to their Signal connection graph, the government can easily tell what other people they communicate privately with.
This is really interesting. It brings two questions to mind.
Don’t all messaging apps use phone number as a primary metadata value?
Are you suggesting that Signal could either not use this metadata or not collect it and yet they choose to collect it and can therefore lose it to exfiltration or warrant?
Nope, for example Wire is based on Signal protocol and doesn’t harvest phone numbers https://wire.com/en
I’m suggesting that if metadata is being leaked then it has to be assumed that it will be used nefariously at some point
Exact same argument that applies for wanting e2e encrypted messages that aren’t seen by the server also applies to any metadata associated with these messages.
Cross referenced you on the sister thread.
People there positing that this is no correct. Granted their info appears to be signal “disclosed” to the feds as part of a court proceed what it collects, which is only apparently when you connect to the server.
Doesnt answer the issue if they could collect your call logs though
My reply from the other thread. People who claim this isn’t true aren’t being honest. The phone number is the key metadata. Meanwhile, nobody outside the people who are actually operating the server knows what it’s doing and what data it retains. Faith based approach to privacy is fundamentally wrong. Any data that the protocol leaks has to be assumed to be available to adversaries.
Furthermore, companies can’t disclose if they are sharing data under warrant. This is why the whole concept of warrant canary exists. Last I checked Signal does not have one.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warrant_canary
JWZ seven years ago: Signal
Wow didn’t even know about that, what a removed show. It’s so weird how Signal has become a sacred cow in the west now, and you can’t have a rational discussion about its many problems without a whole bunch of trolls piling on saying you should just put faith in Signal unconditionally.
It is a decent app, it does what it says. Daddy can’t read your removed until quantum break encryption.
Real question is whether it is a honeypot to make edgelords feelz good. Strong allegation, no doubt but we are also in the grey zone it seems. Based on that, you have to assume, they are farming the info at least to the security apparatus.
phone number isn’t just any metadata; it is the anchoring data around which the rest of metadata is collected, and it is also connected to govt/corporate verified real identity.
why would anyone even claim to offer privacy around such an anchor ?
Exactly, especially when we’re talking about the US government that has access to all the data from other large US based media companies like Google and Meta. We know this for a fact thanks to Snowden leaks. Once you have a phone number, you know the identity of the person, and you can trivially cross reference all the other data to see if that person is of interest. And thanks to their Signal connection graph, the government can easily tell what other people they communicate privately with.
This is really interesting. It brings two questions to mind.
Don’t all messaging apps use phone number as a primary metadata value?
Are you suggesting that Signal could either not use this metadata or not collect it and yet they choose to collect it and can therefore lose it to exfiltration or warrant?
Exact same argument that applies for wanting e2e encrypted messages that aren’t seen by the server also applies to any metadata associated with these messages.