Privacy

32383 readers

198 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

much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

531

Signal Is More Than Encrypted Messaging. Under Meredith Whittaker, It’s Out to Prove Surveillance Capitalism Wrong (www.wired.com)

submitted 3 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

253 comments fedilink hide all child comments

https://ghostarchive.org/archive/0QgXq

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Every app from the Play store requires GCM though, and Signal functions even if a user disables GCM. It pertains to a phone's ability to notify a user of a new message. But again, users can disable GCM and the app itself will continue to work just fine.

For what it's work, the APK on Signal's website (obviously) doesn't have the external Google dependencies. Personally, I really don't see this as an issue at all.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 months ago

There is also Google maps integration. Sure, it's not mandatory anymore, but if you install the official Signal app on a phone with Google play services installed, you are effectively not running an open-source app anymore and this potential backdoor is also not noticeable with reproducible builds.

F-droid has strict rules in place to prevent these sort of things for good reasons, thus the original comment is not entirely wrong in saying that an app that claims to be open-source, but can't be made available on F-droid is a red-flag.