this post was submitted on 20 Sep 2024
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Privacy

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Convincing people to use apps such as Signal is hard work and most can't be convinced. But with those you manage to convince, do you feel happy to talk to them on Signal?

The problem is these people use Signal on Android/IOS which can't be trusted and IOS has recently been in the news for having a backdoor. And it has also been revealed that american feds are able to read everyone's push notifications and they do this as mass surveillance.

So not only do you have to convince people to use Signal which is an incredibly difficult challenge. You also have to convince them to go into settings to disable message and sender being included in the push notifications. And then there's the big question is the Android and IOS operating systems are doing mass surveillance anyway. And many people find it taking a lot of effort to type on the phone so they install Signal on the computer which is a mac or Windows OS.

So I don't think I feel comfortable sending messages in Signal but it's better than Whatsapp.

These were some thoughts to get the discussion started and set the context.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 month ago (5 children)

“Feel,” “happy,” “comfortable”… Privacy doesn’t care about your feelings.

And it has also been revealed that american feds are able to read everyone’s push notifications and they do this as mass surveillance.

Speaking of the feds, it was they who funded the creation of Signal, which is one of the reasons it ought not be trusted.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 month ago (3 children)

They funded encryption too. Why don't you stop using that?

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

Wait until they find out who started the internet. Or who runs GPS satellites

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

History shows that you shouldn’t automatically trust encryption technologies from the US government.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

Just throw your whole computer out the window.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

There is plenty of space between absolute trust and its contrapositive.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (3 children)

Why don't you fork Signal? Then, you'll know the glowies aren't funding you.

Which lines its libre software source code are malicious? Know what libre software is?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Okay, be a dumbass. Why don’t you fork yourself?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Will people read these comments and leave WhatsApp or will they stop caring about privacy?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Totally pointless since the chokepoint is Signal's US-domiciled back-end server, and Signal doesn't allow you to self-host it.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

That says nothing about what they actually run on their server, or who they allow to look at their database. Most importantly, you can't self-host signal anyway, so posting the source code for something you can't verify that they even run, is pointless. They went a whole year one time without updating that repo, until the open source community made an uproar about it, and signal was forced to start updating it again.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

can't self-host signal

False, read its software license, linked above.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

You can't self-host it. People asked for this feature, and were harshly turned down by the signal devs. If you don't believe me, then try it yourself.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

It's an end-to-end encrypted libre app.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 month ago

Reason: Trolling

Good luck with that 😂

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

Wow, the whole argument of the article is basically: funded in part by US government = bad, and making a lot of assumptions, nothing more.

The fund is designated to: “support open technologies and communities that increase free expression, circumvent censorship, and obstruct repressive surveillance as a way to promote human rights and open societies."

One should question the commitment of a fund that dedicates itself to "obstructing surveillance", while being created by a government who runs the most expansive surveillance system in world history. And how the US might define the terms "human rights", and "open society" differently from those who know the US's history in those areas.

How laughable, that is not an argument, it’s nothing more than a guessing game, ignoring that there are different parts of government and different objectives can be true.

Signal's use luckily never caught on by the general public of China, whose government prefers autonomy, rather than letting US tech control its communication platforms, as most of the rest of the world naively allows. (For example, India's most popular social media apps, are Facebook and Youtube, meaning that US surveillance giants own and control the everyday communications of a country much larger than their own). Signal instead became used by US and western activists, and due to the contradictions of surveillance capitalism, also now its general populace.

You have to be kidding right? Championing china, which created a fucking surveillance state and is heavily monitoring the citizens, as an example?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 month ago

Source for China doing what the US does?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

“Feel,” “happy,” “comfortable”… Privacy doesn’t care about your feelings.

The motivation to do the work, spend time learning the risks and available mitigations, disrupt existing social relationships in order to adopt better tools, inconvenience friends and family, partially isolate one's self by avoiding the popular systems... all of these things are part of improving privacy in the real world, and at least for many people, fueled by a person's feelings. Don't discount the human factors just because you can't quantify them.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

Yeah, i did use words that express feelings in this topic I created and it was intentional because when people have to deal with something that involves uncertainty or something so advanced they don't understand it entirely then they can become uncomfortable and scared even though maybe there isn't something to be scared about or maybe the fear is justified.

My post was intended to be a discussion starter so we can dig into this, get to the truth and help everyone including myself to understand everything better.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 month ago

Well, that explains how the NSA keep getting in every so often.