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:
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.