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.
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
I don't really like Apple, but once in a while they do the right thing. This comes from the App store's new labels on apps.
Signal just has "Contact info" under the "Data NOT linked to you" category. This is just the phone number + contact discovery.
There's another post adding telegram here. This is what it looks like:
Signal has mandatory phone numbers linked to you, which is probably the worst thing for privacy. In most countries phone numbers are tied to your identity, and you can easily find someone's name and current address with a phone number.
Lets assume that signal is correctly e2ee encrypting message data, but their database can't encrypt the sender and recipient phone numbers. Its hosted in the US in a centralized place, so we can assume the US government has sender and recipient phone numbers, and message timestamps, and from that can easily build a social graph of connections between people.
You and I can't even use signal, because you'd have to tell me your phone number, which would give me your full name.
(Update: usernames are coming in 2021) As far as I'm concerned from lurking on their community forum over the last year, they're actively working on it because many privacy advocates share the same feeling, inluding Snowden himself and their plan is to require it for signup (which is reasonable to prevent spam) but leave it as an option when it comes to contact discovery, but who knows, they may not require it all.
I shared your opinion when I first started using Signal, but as months have passed and I've been suggesting more people to use Signal and Element, everyone has chosen Signal as their way of communicating with me. When they install Signal, the first thing they point out is the ease of use, the resemblance to WhatsApp, being able to have group calls within the app in both mobile and desktop; in contrast, when they register a Matrix account, they are confused as to how to find me because of the fact that I'm using my personal Matrix homeserver, as well as pointing out how slow the message sending is in the main isntance and how unpolished the UI looks. Also, the fact that I have to use the Jitsi integration for a simple video call and therefore rely on selfhosting another service (Jitsi's main instance video quality is very poor) is inconvenient IMO.
I'm not trying to argue whether one service is better than the other for anyone's case, because at the end of the day I know Matrix is far superior if everyone was technically apt. However, that's not the case with the majority of people, and relying on a phone as an option, which seems to be what Signal is aiming for with all their recent changes on groups and the introduction of PINs, is the best way to go, as people need simple privacy, and Signal is amazing at providing this.
Btw, if anyone's fond of CLI clients (I believe you are, Dess), here are some for both services:
Thanks for this. It's a great explanation of why I recommend Signal more often than Matrix.
FluffyChat is making great strides in this space for Matrix in terms of UI quality. But agree it has the same problem as many open source projects, UI isn't a priority and then people wonder why X project doesn't take off.
I really like fluffychat!
Honestly Element looks and works so badly it always scares me off. It's so slow, the formatting is fucked up and the app is very unintuitive.
Excellent post, thank you.
Same here. I want Matrix to succeed more but the ease of setup for Signal is really the big deal breaker I imagine, plus not having to host or maintain a Matrix instance if you're truly concerned about data management.
Only the recipient actually thanks to sealed sender. So if you're using a VPN, they can't build your social graph. There are services that also allow you to create a one time phone number, which you can then secure with a removed so that you Signal identifier doesn't get taken over by someone else. They are working on making it possible to use usernames instead of phone numbers.
And if you're using Matrix or something like that, you are still trusting the admins of both instances (sender and receiver) with your metadata (and matrix leaks more metadata than Signal). If you're running your own small instance, they can easily build your social graph just by monitoring the connection to that instance.
Signal also has a much more straightforward UX, making it usable for non tech-savvy people, which is often overlooked by free software advocates.
They have a ton of very good arguments here. You can also find Matrix's response.
Here's a video of Moxie's view on decentralization, highly suggest it, great points discussed.
This is why I favor Matrix, I don't have to give anybody any info and it would be hard for the government to build a social graph of my contacts if we use VPN's or Tor to connect.
afaik matrix stores your data, messages (often unencrypted) on the server you signed up on. signal doesn't store anything
that's not actually the case, i read in the signal blog (if i find it i'll link it) that no metadata travels unencrypted and no metadata is stored on the servers. even in groups, there is no database storing the list of members, as the exchange of keys happens only between devices with zero-knowledge. if all the members of the group reset their phones the group is non-existing anymore as it never was anywhere in the first place.
this is against the social graph discovery: https://signal.org/blog/private-contact-discovery/ we are talking about a gem in the privacy landscape, there is no software dedicated like this to privacy at this time
The signal back end isn't open source, so the source for that is "trust me bro". XMPP and matrix back end is fully open source and self-hostable.
They have to store phone numbers, its their primary identifier and routing system.
Its also a single server / cluster all hosted in the US so by definition isn't secure.
Signal backend is open source.
Edit: you might be thinking of telegram.
this is about metadata: there are no timestamps https://signal.org/blog/looking-back-as-the-world-moves-forward/
more on metadata: https://signal.org/blog/sealed-sender/
That gets linked all the time, even though its just a "proposal". You don't know if it works, because the signal back-end is closed source.
this is about the groups: https://signal.org/blog/signal-private-group-system/