Technology

It’s a good move; it shows they are no interested in popularity but Privacy and Security

me neither

In a statement to the publication, Signal president Meredith Whittaker says, “Our privacy standards are extremely high and not only will we not lower them, we want to keep raising them. Currently, working with Facebook Messenger, iMessage, WhatsApp, or even a Matrix service would mean a deterioration of our data protection standards.”

Ugh, okay Meredith, let's pretend it's impossible to handle this with user experience that makes the user acknowledge their conversation with a WhatsApp user is not secure. Meanwhile if the only viable way for this conversion to occur is to have WhatsApp on both ends, the situation less secure. So according to Meredith, the choice is between less overall security or not having conversations with people who don't use Signal. That could makes sense for her salary but it surely is a net negative for Signal users some of which will have to install WhatsApp since they won't be able to afford not to have those conversations.

Signal refusing to federate with WhatsApp, even though meta says they will still use the signal protocol is the most bone headed decision I have ever seen from them.

There no better chance to break the network effect than this.

Meta wants to federate with the whole fediverse eventually. This is first up, then Threads. Remains to be seen if they’ll bother with a Lemmy instance but I wouldn’t be shocked.

So far though the response by the fediverse has been “nah”.

I really wish my country didn't rely so much on whatsapp

This is a centralization problem. Come and force federation upon my SimpleX server in Iceland!

I was hoping to move to signal in the whatapp network. Unfortunately in Brazil you cannot live without whatapp.

On the one hand I agree with them sticking to their guns re: adamantly protecting privacy.

On the other, the number of contacts I have using signal has dropped off a cliff, from 12 to just one. It certainly isn't rising. The people I know who used it have abandoned it and went back to WhatsApp.

Getting rid of SMS support was a mistake.

I'd personally prefer that when messaging with someone using WhatsApp, they make clear to you that Facebook can and will have some metadata, but not the contents of the chat itself. Shit, make it opt-in.

A big part of why nobody uses signal is because... nobody uses signal. If you could still talk to people on WhatsApp, the de facto standard in most of the world bar the US and China, more people might give it a try, and thus more people over time would be having signal-to-signal conversations.

IMO a good but imperfect solution is preferable to nobody using Signal, which is the realistic alternative.

I'll continue donating to Signal, but much like their SMS decision, I believe this to be a mistake that will severely hamper adoption.

Extremely bad take in my opinion. Not supporting alternatives means you force users into installing the alternatives

There is one thing about interoperability that I don't see many people talking about:

Your messages going to and being handled by other services means you'd be subject to their TOS and privacy policy as well.

As long as services are transparent about it so users can make informed decisions based on it, that's generally fine.

But then services like Beeper, or just Matrix bridges in general, make it so anyone can setup such a connection between services without their contacts even knowing about it.

Matrix will implement a bridge using the new api, that's enough for me.

What sort of irks me is what a mixed bag EU regulation is. Some is good (GDPR), not denying that. Some is annoying (you're going to be accepting cookies 100 times a day until you're dead thanks to them), and Whatsapp runs on all devices, so while interoperability nice, even as a free-software, Linux person I don't really care.

However, if you have to deal with friends or family in the US and you don't have an iPhone though, god help you. They don't care about this.

I guess my complaint is that EU regulation may seem legally elegant, but I think it is sometimes quite blind to the real situation on the ground.

It looks good on the books but we still, say, don't have a standard ARM boot process for smartphones that would help users not be dependent on whatever shitty ROM the OEM wants them to have. That would be life changing, but it will never even be talked about.

If only those apps could have the ability to use an open protocol they were actually built on, that would allow this exact interoperability needed instead of a proprietary half-assed solution, what was its name again...?

I understand her point and imho that's what makes signal a superior option to the others but because of these extreme choices I've seen the usage of signal gradually go down (might be wrong for the total number of users) around me. Now I don't anyone who uses signal anymore.

it's a real shame it's ridiculous to be using whatsapp but I have whatsapp installed on my phone not signal because that's what everyone uses.

That's a bummer. Means I have no alternative but to keep using WhatsApp then.

I'm indifferent, since I've got both installed, there's no escaping having to use WhatsApp in many countries around the globe. If I want to keep in touch with family/friends then only one or two contacts use signal, for everyone else it's WhatsApp or the alternative is SMS.

I'm also indifferent though because of I want the interoperability, Beeper is doing fine.

give whatsapp users green bubbles