this post was submitted on 04 Aug 2021
26 points (100.0% liked)
Privacy
33192 readers
562 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
Actually, signal minimize metadata. The sealer metadata is encrypted, only the address remains unencrypted. Also, signal received subpoenas in 2016 from from the Eastern District of Virginia and in 2021 from from the United States Attorney’s Office in the Central District of California. Those subpoenas requested a wide variety of information that fell into this nonexistent category, including the addresses of the users, their correspondence, and the name associated with each account. In fact, signal only provided;
And of course the phone number... I really prefer something that requires zero phone number (like Session as an alternative) but thing is you'll find most people on Signal (through their phone number)...
I'd also prefer services that requires no phone number. However, in the end it's not really a concern for the vast majority of people. In the context we usually live almost everyone uses privacy invasive services. so if a person ditch services like WhatsApp for Signal it's a win. It's highly unlikely that a regular Joe who doesn't know a squat about privacy and security is going to use more private services like matrix,session, briar etc.
Signal it's quite good in this area, the initial setup and GUI it's quite equal to WhatsApp, E2EE is on by default and doesn't require any additional user interaction, the metadata collected is minimized etc.