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.
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 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.