this post was submitted on 10 Aug 2024
587 points (98.5% liked)
Privacy
32108 readers
534 users here now
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 :)
Related communities
Chat rooms
-
[Matrix/Element]Dead
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I wrote this, but I'd also like to add Drew Devault - Why I don't trust signal. There's a huge disconnect between what privacy advocates are saying about signal, and what reddit "privacy" communities think about it. If you read the article I linked, you'll see its because the Open Technology Fund (a US state-run entity), actively pushes signal in privacy spaces.
Signal is secure and anyone who says it isn't needs to have very strong evidence. It has been audited by hundreds of people at this point.
Source: trust me bro.
Seriously tho, that's been most of the defense of signal advocates, with zero backup other than signal's own claims. Signal is not self-hostable, and all the data lives on a centralized, US-domiciled server, subject to NSL requests (the US issues ~ 60 of them per day).
Unfortunately you can't verify what their server stores, nor the metadata that they are legally required to share with the US government (which includes phone numbers, and your name and address).
BTW if signal is secure, can you give us your phone number, so we can use it with you?
Signal is end to end encrypted. Everything related to encryption happens inside the app. It doesn't matter if the server is in mainland China it would still be secure. However, that doesn't mean it is anonymous. Signal is pretty bad from that perspective.
You don't need the phone number to contact someone with Signal.
Wrong, you need a phone number to create a signal account.
Yes, to create an account, but not to contact someone. You have an habit of being off the mark.
Also there is a difference between giving your phone number to some service and giving it to some random on the internet.
They must've added that recently then, but still doesn't get around the fact that they're required, which means signal (and likely the US government) knows exactly who you talk to and when.