this post was submitted on 25 Aug 2024
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Privacy
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Signal
Ah yes, the metadata collection app for the NSA.
Isn't Signal's whole thing that they reduce metadata as much as they can? What do you recommend? Matrix and XMPP certainly aren't options if you value metadata protection.
The phone number is the most important piece of metadata, and collecting numbers of people who want to use e2ee and are willing to use an app that's inconvenient, then building graphs of these people and cross referencing the numbers with all the other data the government has is clearly valuable.
Whether other apps are better or worse in terms of collection of metadata is completely irrelevant when evaluating whether Signal itself is safe. However, as far as alternatives go Simplex https://simplex.chat/ seems to be one of the better options.
Even if no chat app protected metadata properly, that's still an important fact to acknowledge. Furthermore, it may be more important for people to protect their metadata from a specific government that has agency over them. If you live in US or a US protectorate, then data being leaked to the US government is your primary concern.
I mean, Signal has over 100 million downloads on the Play Store alone. Even on the odd chance those phone numbers do somehow end up in the hands of the NSA or whatever the chances of it actually relaying any real information about you is second to none.
Even then, you can't assume everyone who uses Signal wants to use e2ee explicitly. Some might just like the app's style, some might have family members who only use Signal, some might have an ethical problem with corporate apps but aren't computer-brained enough to know how SimpleX or Jabber or some other obscure alternative works.
Is the phone number requirement bad? Yes, absolutely. Does that instantly rule out all opportunity for it being a good app, privacy wise? Definitely not.
Further; privacy should be simple. Signal is designed to be as close to perfect as it can be without compromising too much privacy. They have decided that a phone number is necessary to prevent spam, and to combat the privacy implications of that they have chosen not to block temporary numbers for those who are more concerned.
Private chat apps are useless if noone knows how to use them. Signal tries to fix that, and I think they're doing a pretty good job even if it does have it's pitfalls.
I think you missed the point there. The value for the NSA is in knowing which phone numbers communicate with other phone numbers which is precisely the metadata that Signal leaks. This allows you to build networks of users who are doing private communication. Next, you can cross reference the phone numbers with the data from Google, Meta, etc. and then if you see that one of them is a person of interest, then you immediately know the other people they talk to who are now also of interest.
The fact that people keep trying to downplay this is truly phenomenal to me. Once again, Signal is an app that uses a central server based in the US, that almost certainly shares data with the government. Anybody who minimally cares about their privacy should be concerned about this.
Signal is not an app that's private. Period. If you don't understand this then you don't understand what the term privacy means.