this post was submitted on 07 Jan 2021
33 points (94.6% liked)
Privacy
33192 readers
592 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
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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.
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/