I need a tldr someone tech-savvy
this post was submitted on 28 Jan 2025
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Signal will now allow your old messages being exported to another device. Previously needed to do a full transfer to another device.
What is this headline
When they gonna allow sign up without a phone number. Or allow federation with 3rd party signal severs. Or allow sign up without a phone number that's linked to ur real identity by law in most countries.
The more I learn about signal the less I trust them.
I think at this point it should be pretty clear that Signal never had the goal of anonymity which is an orthogonal concept to privacy. While I would support sign-up without phone numbers, it doesn't address the same threat-model and there are many alternatives if anonymity is your goal.
But I want near-perfect privacy with usability, which Signal provides for me and all my contacts. Who cares if my government knows I use Signal, as long as they don't know who I talk to and what we talk about.
Edit: just saw your other response. What you want to achieve, is almost impossible. Even if Signal doesn't log who you talk to, like you assume, there are still methods to unmask this info. There are PoCs for things like timing attacks for notifications etc. which combined can narrow down the list of contacts significantly. But it seems like your threat-model doesn't align with Signal goals which means it's probably best for you to search an alternative instead of hating on Signal for not catering to your needs.
keep spreading FUD, my guy 😎
Hey signal is better than most of the mainstream bs. I use it myself and I'm confident that the messages themselves are secure. However, everything I said is 100% true.
Since we cannot verify the software they run on the server is the software that is open source then we must assume it is not.
We know for a majority of cases a phone number = a real identity. Signal implements sealed sender but since signal is a centralised point they can correlate the sealed sender extraordinarily easily. We must therefore assume signal knows when and who is communicating (We can verify they don't know what is being said) this therefore means signal could theoretically have a full social graph of real identities for every singe user.
This is of course after we remember signal received funding from BBG which is an organisation funded by the us government purely for the purpose of promoting american propaganda.
Its not FUD its true. Signal can either adapt and prove themselves with more than a "trust me bro" or they can die. Just cos they are better than the alternatives does not mean we should not demand better.