I don’t know if I’m opening a can of worms here, and I’m still trying to backtrack a lot of history where I was tuning everything out. I keep seeing random swipes at Signal (or the representatives (?)), and I was wondering whether they are founded or just lies.Is it another situation like Lemmy where we just “take the technology and move on”? Thanks!
Different people don’t like it for different reasons. Some people don’t like it because they think it has CIA financial backing (nope), and some people don’t like it because it requires your phone number, therefore it is not private (the privacy it provides is more than sufficient for anyone not actively being persecuted by a Five Eyes state), and some people don’t like it because it feels corporate (it’s a 501c3 nonprofit, and how corporate it feels is subjective).
And some people don’t like it because it used to handle SMS on Android, and they removed that feature for security reasons.
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This is how TextSecure worked before it was renamed to Signal and removed SMS support.
Getting people to switch to Signal was difficult in the first place Imagine trying to get them to use PGP lmao
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there’s oversec on f-droid that can almost automate this
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This got me thinking that it should also be possible to automate on iOS with Shortcuts….
That was a pretty wild decision
It was very unpopular with my girlfriend, who I had just gotten into using Signal a few months prior.
Handling SMS and handling secure/encrypted messages could’ve made people think they communicate securely while relying on text messages instead.
Not handling SMS fixes this source of confusion and I applaud their decision.
I think the number of people who care deeply about privacy and cannot tell the difference between an sms or signal message is minimal. There were plenty of ways signal could have highlighted DANGER UNSECURE CHANNEL if they had wanted to, or made it an off-by-default option, rather than drop SMS entirely. For myself and many other people it meant that family members dropped Signal rather than have an extra messaging app, and so I’m still stuck with WhatsApp on my phone…
There were ways to make it clear that it was insecure that didn’t alienate an arguable majority of their casual userbase.
If only the was some indicator for unsecure messages, such as a grey send button and an open padlock. 🙄
I think having an unlocked symbol for standard SMS would’ve helped that…
And you seriously think most people would look at and act on such an icon instead of just ignoring it?
Or just accept that not everyone will be having a secure conversation every time at first, but more will be secured as more and more people like me convince our family members to use it and eventually we transition everyone away from SMS?
No, of course not, why would we build a critical mass of users like that?
Since they removed SMS support almost my entire family and my friends uninstalled signal, except a few who keep it to talk to me, and my half dozen friends privacy-conscious enough to care. Dozens of people, down to eight if you don’t count me, in my circles alone. Objectively, removing SMS support harmed Signal’s popularity and made everyone less secure. The argument for why they did it was at best myopic and also, in my opinion, utter bullshit.
The problem is that most people don’t want multiple text apps, they just want one. I had gotten a number of people using signal, and it was secure when we talked, but when signal dropped SMS, almost every one of them stopped using it, so then none of their conversations were secure.
Yeah, the never-ending weighting between convenience and security.
But are you going to tell me that those people don’t have Whatsapp, Threema, Telegram or any other IM installed and just use plain SMS instead?
Yep, just the default messaging app on their phone.
This was such a dumb decision
Accurate. And if you are being targeted by 5 eyes, your phone is probably fucked, one app vs another probably won’t make a difference
I understand why, but I get annoyed that I can’t integrate it into ferdium with my other things like discord, e-mail and calendar.
Some people don’t like that they attached a crypto wallet to the app. I couldn’t care less and use the messenger daily!
I don’t care or use it either, but I haven’t seen a single use case for that wallet nor mobilecoins. Does people actually use it and for what?
My friend sent me some MOB coins mainly because he could attach messages with the transactions. So no idea what it’s really used for
I don’t think I’ve ever seen people say it has CIA financial backing. It did however until only a couple of years ago have strong ties to the State Department’s Open Tech Fund (from the same financial envelope that brings you RFA/RFE/VOA).
The main developer of Lemmy seems to think there’s a solid connection. I’m not jumping in that fight, I got no dog in that fight, I don’t have that kind of threat model.
https://dessalines.github.io/essays/why_not_signal.html#cia-funding
However, considering he’s openly Marxist, he may be just slightly biased.
I suspect OP of this post actually saw the recent /c/Privacy thread over at lemmy.ml where Dessalines was proselytizing against Signal while not seeming to have a problem with SimpleX chat being funded by a group of Venture Capital investors, including Jack Dorsey.
I think he also avoid criticizing tele which is even more swiss cheese than signal
Nothing in there is incorrect.
Openly Marxist is just the start of it. Dude is utterly unhinged, so his theories don’t mean a lot to me unless they’re backed by evidence.