Me neither lol
Extremely bad take in my opinion. Not supporting alternatives means you force users into installing the alternatives
Nope. Fuck people stupid enough to use FBInc at all.
Using whatsapp is an absolute necessity in most of the world, its the only way to communicate with coworkers, classmates, businesses and even some government services. Not using it means you are essentially disconnected from the world. Good luck convincing more than 2 close friends to install Signal just to talk with you. No one uses SMS. FB really is that dominant.
Doesn’t give any reason to swallow that kind of sucker punch.
It’s OK to be “disconnected.”
Especially if “connected” implies dependency on one corporation which has shown general disregard for its customers’ privacy and mental health.
I don’t use Whatsapp, FB, Instagram, snapchat, google, and somehow manage to make my way through the world.
Believe it or not plenty of people still interact in meatspace, limited as it is.
If you don’t live in a place with WhatsApp as the dominant chat app I don’t think you could get it. I don’t have FB, Instagram, Snapchat, Google, Outlook, or any form of social media, I am as disconnected as can be. But WA is truly inescapable.
Need to ask a very specific question about taxes? The government support person only answers through WhatsApp. Need to file an insurance report and even check if it was approved? WhatsApp. Need to schedule a certification exam? Whatsapp. Hell, more and more companies and government services are moving to WA only customer service/support, like not even help you if you show up in person and in some cases their phone lines (which are “always busy”) just direct you to their WhatsApp.
Its also the only way of reaching coworkers/classmates. Not for like socializing or messing around, but for group work, file sharing, scheduling meetings, sharing important/urgent announcements, etc. And good luck getting mere acquaintances to install a secondary chat app just to talk to you, when we can barely get our friends to install adblockers in their browsers. Well, there are other secondary ways to reach them, Facebook Messenger and Instagram DMs, but we both likely agree on what to make of these ones.
I hate Facebook and am aware of their practices, but they have reached an absolute dominance over communication in most of the world. You can’t just ignore them in day to day life.
The people who say “just don’t use WhatsApp” really don’t understand. They may as well be saying “just don’t use email”
For millions, possibly billions of people, it’s a straight-up requirement for partaking in modern society.
Like somebody else here said, the EU has handed Signal, on a silver platter, the chance to become a mainstream messaging app, and rather than embrace it, Signal have comprehensively rejected it.
Honestly, what are they doing?
It might be OK for you to be “disconnected”, but some of us have got stuff to do.
It’s easy not to use Facebook, Snapchat or Instagram.
Even not using Google is easy as you can just use any other search engine like Ecosia.
Sadly, not using WhatsApp would be a real organizational problem for me with people I ain’t close enough to force them to use Threema.
So I’m forced to have both apps installed. Threema for 95% of the time and 5% with WhatsApp.
Clearly written by someone from somewhere where WhatsApp isn’t de facto mandatory.
Yup and no fucks given.
Ooh you’re hard.
If you think think such of no respect for the FBInc or fucking any closed source software then, yeah, duh.
People could be using WhatsApp if they cared about it, but they chose signal for a reason. And making signal weaken its privacy for the purpose of reaching more people is against everything they stand for.
The trouble is we end up having to install both when we could be only using Signal
Same goes for people who you convince to install Signal. They’ll end up never using it because they just forget about it and they’re not the ones who wanted to use it anyway. Being able to message people on WhatsApp through Signal would also make it a lot more easy to convince people to install it.
And once those people have it installed, they’ll talk to each other using signal-to-signal as opposed to signal-to-whatsapp!
It pretty much solves the chicken and egg problem, and yet they’re scoffing at it as a solution. IMO it’s a big mistake.
Using only signal in such a scenario is like using only whatsapp today, to chat with whatsapp contacts. What are you hoping to gain?
But it’s not the same - there’s a community of people doing the same thing, and with those contacts you’ll be using Signal.
I would use signal if I could convince people to use signal.
I could convince people to use Signal if all their conversations were on signal and they could talk to people on WhatsApp in a seamless way.
Right now you MUST have WhatsApp if you have any kind of social life. Signal is the other app that no one has because it’s kind of a pain in the ass to have two messaging apps.
I would love to switch to Signal, but inter-compatibility with WhatsApp is a must. The EU is essentially handing them a golden opportunity on a silver platter to become a mainstream app, and they are like nah, we good wtf
This is correct, and everybody who complains about how “hard” it is to use more than one messenger app is pathetic. That’s like the epitome of first world problems. People should be GLAD that they have the option of using Signal, instead of whining about how they didn’t build it the way they wanted it to be.
Its hard to get others to do so, for seemingly no reason. I have Signal installed, have had it for years, have told all my contacts about it. Only like 3 installed it, but quickly forgot about it. I still have to have WhatsApp installed to not fall off the world so they end up texting me from WA anyway.
Its not like SMS vs Signal where there is a clear benefit to the average Joe to use Signal, there’s no difference between Signal and WhatsApp to the average person so they will just keep using WhatsApp out of habit.
It’s not hard for me to get others to use it. I simply don’t have a Whatsapp account or anything else. If they want to contact me, they will use the right app.
Thats great, now try that with acquaintances, coworkeea, classmates or companies that only chat through WhatsApp. I wish I could go nuclear but WA is a necessity.
Your problem is you allow them to do that to you. I simply do not allow it, and it works out fine for me. Have never used WhatsApp a single time.
It is literally not a necessity. It’s a convenience that you are making yourself dependent on.
I can only agree with you, it is a choice we’re making.
Still I don’t feel like I want to tell people other than my family or friends to give up on me or switch to threema.
I’m still thinking about it, but the downsides are bigger than the upsides for now.
give whatsapp users green bubbles
😂
I understand her point and imho that’s what makes signal a superior option to the others but because of these extreme choices I’ve seen the usage of signal gradually go down (might be wrong for the total number of users) around me. Now I don’t anyone who uses signal anymore.
it’s a real shame it’s ridiculous to be using whatsapp but I have whatsapp installed on my phone not signal because that’s what everyone uses.
Signal were fools to remove the SMS support from their app. That was a good way to get people in to use the system - they could have insecure SMS chats with those not on signal, and secure signal chats with those on it. The app would warn you when someone didn’t have signal and the chat was insecure.
It was a really good “trojan horse” route into people’s lives. I was using signal every day and it was easier encouraging others to make the switch because it was a convenient app.
Then the devs removed that and dumped all their users back onto other SMS apps.
Now I have 3 apps - an SMS app, Signal and WhatsApp. I barely ever use Signal now. I want to use it more but so few people I know use it, and it’s not the first place people message me from.
Removing SMS support was a huge strategic misstep. They should have been the bridge for people to move from SMS to secure chat.
While I do think you are correct, you have to remember a few things:
- SMS really isn’t used outside the US (and iMessage pretty much was the death of text messages and now iMessage also supports RCS)
- Open source projects can be strict about following a moral code
- Anything more than just sending secure messages is just an attack vector and more layers of code to maintain
A bit offtopic, but, are SMS free on the US?
Indeed, in my country SMS are not used at all. Too expensive compared to alternatives.
I tried switching to Signal a couple years ago but I had to return to WhatsApp since literally no one of my friends and acquaintances did the jump. It wasn’t even considered an option by many. So it was either returning to Whatsapp or being cut off from everyone.
If people were a bit more open-minded Signal could be a good alternative. But alas…
can’t have 2 apps installed?
I got my whole family on it, and generally all my closest friends have it as at least a backup. As the other chat apps falter it’s been easier to convert people.
So then it seems completely absurd signal is “not interested” in allowing any integration. They could just notify their users communications with WhatsApp users are unsecure.
Matrix will implement a bridge using the new api, that’s enough for me.
This is a centralization problem. Come and force federation upon my SimpleX server in Iceland!
Indeed. I wish your comment was the most visible here.
Signal and Threema can be all about privacy, but they are still companies which can make money only by keeping their service as centralized as possible.
Decentralised messaging like Matrix, XMPP, Jami, have no issue with interoperability.
You’ll be happy to know it’s the top comment thread, at least in Sync
I’m using sync, it’s the second top-most for me.
Signal is developped by a non-profit.
You are right.
SimpleX looked pretty intriguing…is it basically a better / private / more secure replacement for IRC?
pretty much, though it’s pretty basic in terms of functionality at the moment
upvote for SimpleX
or even a Matrix service would mean a deterioration of our data protection standards
Why? They use same algos, same scheme. Just add support for matrix message format in your app.
I believe Matrix doesn’t have nearly as strong (if any) metadata encryption as Signal
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WhatsApp is closed source, and obviously it must be able to decrypt messages for the end user to read them. Anything could happen to the unencrypted data at this point. Therefore it’s less secure allowing conversations to flow into that app.
Re-read my comment please. I’m talking about Matrix, not whatsapp. Not downvoting because you are correct, but it is out of context.
Thanks for clarifying, my bad!
Using Threema is not an option. This is paid software and it is too difficult to purchase a license for this software when Google does not allow us to pay for purchases through their Android app store. No one from my entourage will bother paying for a license for this software using cryptocurrency. They will just install another messenger.
Know many people who bought Threema on Google Play
I think you can buy keys for Android on the threema website
You can buy a license directly from Threema via credit card, btc or cash in the mail.
I know this. That’s why I wrote that it’s too difficult to deal with cryptocurrency payments on their website. Most people won’t do it. Other payment methods are not available from my country.
I’ve bought Threema for my whole family on iOS and Androids. Never paid in crypto but always with my normal credit card.
It works perfectly fine and I love it👍
Back in the 80s and 90s we imagined a world of interoperable standards all agreed upon by the industry leaders for the benefit of all.
Then capitalism took over and shat on EVERYTHING.
In a statement to the publication, Signal president Meredith Whittaker says, “Our privacy standards are extremely high and not only will we not lower them, we want to keep raising them. Currently, working with Facebook Messenger, iMessage, WhatsApp, or even a Matrix service would mean a deterioration of our data protection standards.”
Ugh, okay Meredith, let’s pretend it’s impossible to handle this with user experience that makes the user acknowledge their conversation with a WhatsApp user is not secure. Meanwhile if the only viable way for this conversion to occur is to have WhatsApp on both ends, the situation less secure. So according to Meredith, the choice is between less overall security or not having conversations with people who don’t use Signal. That could makes sense for her salary but it surely is a net negative for Signal users some of which will have to install WhatsApp since they won’t be able to afford not to have those conversations.
Ugh, okay Meredith, let’s pretend it’s impossible to handle this with user experience that makes the user acknowledge their conversation with a WhatsApp user is not secure. Meanwhile if the only viable way for this conversion to occur is to have WhatsApp on both ends, the situation less secure.
I don’t agree with this. The only way to have the conversation is to have Signal at both ends.
while i see where you’re coming from, being able to message WhatsApp users from a client app that respects privacy would be better than being forced to have WhatsApp installed on your device, with it snooping casually on your everyday device usage and your contact list and so on.
WhatsApp is the only Facebook app on my phone and i’d love to get rid of it without losing the ability to message all those buffons using it (which make up for 99% of my social circle)
Exactly. Let us choose if we want to interact with WhatsApp or not.
I’d be ready to sacrifice some security in order to not have WhatsApp installed on my phone.
Of course it would be cool to just get rid of WhatsApp but I can’t force my whole basketball team to go on Threema…
while i see where you’re coming from, being able to message WhatsApp users from a client app that respects privacy would be better than being forced to have WhatsApp installed on your device
Who’s forcing you? I removed everything Zuckerberg and just informed people I use only Signal now. I had to help my parents a bit with the install and the pin, younger than 70s did it themselves. I found that, if you have a reason for boycotting, people will just give you a hundred MB of their phone space and install Signal along with whatsapp
BTW, you can somewhat mitigate the spyware by using Shelter.
It’s the same argument they used when ditching SMS-support ☹️
I’m not nearly as salty about SMS because of the following differences from the WhatsApp scenario. Signal-SMS was only supported on Android, call it half of Signal users whereas a potential WhatsApp integration (or lack thereof) would affect nearly all Signal users. Then the Android users who have to reach others over SMS already have a built-in system app that does this, so they don’t have to install third party app that exists to vacuum data. So the downgrade for the Android Signal user is in ease of use, not in overall security.
Except most people are not going to tolerate having a multiplicity of apps, and if people in your circle don’t already use signal, they definitely won’t now. Whereas previously, I was getting pretty decent traction from people slowly adding it.
In the modern age, it’s getting easier to hard-line your messaging platform though.
If people are already used to having multiple messaging clients for multiple people, it’s less of a jump to add one more.
This has been my experience as well. In the past friends and family were more reluctant to break away from whatever their default communication app was. These days most people are already familiar with the idea of using one thing to text, another to “message”, and often more than that. I’ve had great success converting people to more secure platforms now that they understand the process.
Don’t the built in system apps also vacuum data?
This is Lemmy. Here we believe everything vacuums data!
The built-in apps get and send SMS from a system service on Android. In nearly every case the system app is from the same vendor as the system itself which means there’s no significant opportunity for data disclosure that doesn’t already exist within the system. If anything , the system has much larger opportunity to vacuum data. Therefore if you don’t trust the system SMS app, you shouldn’t trust the system either. If you trust the system, you can probably trust the system SMS app too. Third party SMS apps present net additional opportunity for data disclosure so one has to trust the one they use doesn’t vacuum data.
It’s doable we are not in the kindergarten and school groups we might miss a few things but worked so fast for us. And I convinced both my job teams to use Signal
Yeah we’re like super serious about privacy so we require you to make you’re account based on a unique, hard to change, personally identifiable, insecure data point and require you to show it to everyone you talk to. The fact that they’re only now starting to test hiding your phone number is beyond asinine. Any arguments signal has about security I might listen to but their concept of privacy is laughable.
a net negative for Signal users some of which will have to install WhatsApp since they won’t be able to afford not to have those conversations.
I just had to do exactly this for a little league group 😭
Ugh, okay Meredith, let’s pretend it’s impossible to handle this with user experience that makes the user acknowledge their conversation with a WhatsApp user is not secure. Meanwhile if the only viable way for this conversion to occur is to have WhatsApp on both ends, the situation less secure.
It is a privacy concern, not a security one.
So according to Meredith, the choice is between less overall security or not having conversations with people who don’t use Signal.
Could you cite this please? Because I do not see this beeing said or implied.
That could makes sense for her salary but it surely is a net negative for Signal users some of which will have to install WhatsApp since they won’t be able to afford not to have those conversations.
Entirley different conversation, accusations and projections. So dropping this.
I’m indifferent, since I’ve got both installed, there’s no escaping having to use WhatsApp in many countries around the globe. If I want to keep in touch with family/friends then only one or two contacts use signal, for everyone else it’s WhatsApp or the alternative is SMS.
I’m also indifferent though because of I want the interoperability, Beeper is doing fine.
That is one good thing about america, whatsapp never caught
Yeahhh it’s amazing, your choices are a closed platform that forces you to buy their expensive devices, or SMS, or another proprietary platform ran by a notorious privacy predator.
sms is fine.
SMS sucks. Not private and it handcuffs you to a phone. Who wants to type on a phone when you’re at a real keyboard?
That’s the only reason I started using Telegram. It might not be secure or whatever, but it sure is nice to have voice and video calling on a nice-looking desktop app. It’s the only one I was able to get my family to use, and that I already had some friends using.
But I could never get them to use advanced shit like SimpleX or something similar lol. “But this already works?” Yeeeaaah but… Nah, it’ll never fly. 😑
Sms has been god awful since the beginning, both the standard and the business implementation. Remember bullshit pricing models for texts? 10center per text over your limit. Even today, the standard hasn’t kept up with modern times.
Sms is not encrypted, your service provider can read all your texts.
Theoretically anyone at the right point can read all your SMS texts.
A great example being the police “stingray tower” system that masquerades as a cell tower that your phone will happily (and quietly) connect to.
Convince a phone that you’re just another authorized relay, have a target in mind, and it’s like reading postcards before they hit the mailbox.
This is also why it’s an absolute joke for 2FA, but institutions like banks still happily use it because it’s easy to understand.
Not only easy to understand but for a while it was the only way to do 2fa that was usable by lots of people. Smartphones aren’t as ubiquitous as people think, even today.
SMS’s fall from grace wasn’t actually that it could be intercepted, it was the fact it started being used as an excuse to ask for a phone number and use that to track people.
Google still won’t allow you to use any form of 2fa if you don’t give them a phone number. Twitch/Amazon too. Facebook used to (until they got Whatsapp, now they don’t need to ask.) LinkedIn used to (until they got broken into so many times it became a humongous liability).
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It’s certainly different, but for signal users who want to maintain that level of privacy, it’s probably something they want, right? From their perspective this is probably a good decision.
I’m indifferent because I’d personally rather have interoperability and Beeper gets the job done.
What sort of irks me is what a mixed bag EU regulation is. Some is good (GDPR), not denying that. Some is annoying (you’re going to be accepting cookies 100 times a day until you’re dead thanks to them), and Whatsapp runs on all devices, so while interoperability nice, even as a free-software, Linux person I don’t really care.
However, if you have to deal with friends or family in the US and you don’t have an iPhone though, god help you. They don’t care about this.
I guess my complaint is that EU regulation may seem legally elegant, but I think it is sometimes quite blind to the real situation on the ground.
It looks good on the books but we still, say, don’t have a standard ARM boot process for smartphones that would help users not be dependent on whatever shitty ROM the OEM wants them to have. That would be life changing, but it will never even be talked about.
The cookie consent also has a huge fail whale of unintended consequences - training users to click [accept], or really [anything], to make the annoyance just go away.
And nefarious actors have their run of the place now. They can slip onerous terms into EULAs and know they will largely be accepted.
As well as random [Continue] boxes to install malware or whatever they want since users are so well trained to click just to get it the fuck off their screen.
That wont hold in court tho
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Mimimimimimimimimi
If you have nothing to say, say nothing at all.
Same to you, bud
just get an extension and adblocker filters to automatically dismiss/block cookie dialogs and use an allowlist for sites from which you actually need to persist cookies in your browser’s settings and set your browser to delete everything else on exit. With Firefox and browsers based on it you can, in addition to that, use container tabs (try sticky containers extension) for even better context isolation.
Obviously. But that is very difficult on mobile.
on Firefox if a desktop addon has no mobile version you can look up how to add custom add-ons collections when it comes to cookie prompt blockers, but ublock origin and adding filters to it work out of the box. Recently also some apps started showing cookie prompts with no option to decline unless you pay, if they can work offline, make them so
Interesting. I’ll check it out. I didn’t know that.
(BTW from my understanding of the law sites cannot block functionality if you decline cookies. But it is rarely enforced)
Wait and see what happens when Google removes traditional tracking from Chrome and every sites start requiring registration to access content !
Right. That’s a very different business model. I don’t necessarily have an opinion about whether it would be better or worse. It is easier to look at our current problems and say it would be better. But, eh, I can block most trackers and be a leach off of websites that stay up by selling other people’s data. shrug
I partially agree with you, and of course I hate those cookie banners, they’re completely annoying.
But please remember that it’s not the EU’s fault is every website is trying to violate your privacy.
If websites weren’t tracking everything you do, then cookie banners wouldn’t be needed.
I think we should collectively ask for websites to stop spying on us, not changing the cookie banners regulation.
That’s already a solution to cookie banners: the “do not track” setting. It’s been tested in court in Germany and confirmed to count as rejected permission for GDPR purposes. Websites dinky have to obey it.
It’s currently slowly gaining traction, there’s a privacy advocacy group suing high profile targets over this to create awareness.
We also need a formal change to the cookie law/GDPR to acknowledge “do not track” as the preferred method. Then the banners will slowly go away.
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And yet we live in a world where consent spam is actually harder to deal with than tracking, if you’re smart.
There is one thing about interoperability that I don’t see many people talking about:
Your messages going to and being handled by other services means you’d be subject to their TOS and privacy policy as well.
As long as services are transparent about it so users can make informed decisions based on it, that’s generally fine.
But then services like Beeper, or just Matrix bridges in general, make it so anyone can setup such a connection between services without their contacts even knowing about it.
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Your messages going to and being handled by other services means you’d be subject to their TOS and privacy policy as well.
This is true of literally every one of your contacts, too. When you send someone a message, they can screenshot, copy, archive, and forward however they see fit (and most people don’t govern themselves by any kind of TOS or privacy policy). Which then means that if any one of your contacts chooses to use another service as a bridge, or as an archival tool, you’re naturally going to expose your messages to that service, on that contact’s terms.
But that isn’t about interoperability per se. It’s about how other people store and use their copy of data shared between multiple users. Apple iMessage isn’t interoperable with anything, but users still have conversations archived all the way back to the beginning of the service over a decade ago, and can choose to export those messages to be saved elsewhere. (For example, I use a bridge for iMessage so that I can view them on my Android phone, but the mechanism is software that leverages the Mac’s accessibility API).
Some of us are data hoarders. If you’re gonna have a conversation with people like me, you’ll have to trust that we don’t use those archives in a way that either inadvertently/negligently or intentionally exposes that data to some bad actor. I’d like to think I do a good job of respecting my friends’ privacy, and secure my systems, but I’m probably not perfect.
With Signal’s default settings, Google reads your Signal messages when they come in through push notifications.
Correct me if I’m wrong.
Edit: For those in doubt, last year, I started seeing content-aware auto-reply options in my Signal message notifications; that is not a function of Signal, but a function of Google’s Android. One could escape it by using a de-Googled Android like Lineage or Graphene, or by hiding the message content (which is not the Signal default) and would surely hurt Signal’s adoption, when you have to unlock the app to read each message.
that’s not how push works. usually, google would only know you received a notification, but not it’s contents. that “dummy” notification wakes the app up, which decrypts and shows the real notification.
content aware stuff runs entirely locally on your phone, so no data is sent to google (unless you have telemetry enabled, in which case the reply or action you used will be sent to google together with the next telemetry data upload)yes, some apps actually push the content directly through the push system, but that’s not how this is handled in most apps that handle private data in notifications.
Or… And hear me out, Molly FOSS with Unified Push notifications. Problem solved!
I’m looking in to this, thank you!
Edit: Molly (UnifiedPush) isn’t something I can reasonably expect friends and family to set up.
Please note that to receive notifications, you will need to set up a server to run MollySocket, available on https://github.com/mollyim/mollysocket.
You need the right flavor of Molly to use UnifiedPush: https://github.com/mollyim/mollyim-android-unifiedpush. You can install MollySocket via: Docker/Podman: docker pull ghcr.io/mollyim/mollysocket:latest Crates.io: cargo install mollysocket (see INSTALL.md for the setup) Direct download: https://github.com/mollyim/mollysocket/releases (see INSTALL.md for the setup) A distributor app (easiest is ntfy) You can optionally install your own push server like ntfy or NextPush. For beginners, you can use a free service like ntfy.sh (do consider donating if you have the means).
You are wrong ;-) The push stuff is just used to signal the receiver that there is a new message. No meaningful data is sent that way. Not even an encrypted message.
At some point, Android is reading the message to generate the quick replies that were showing in the notification. They’re content-aware and this is not a function of Signal; if someone sent me a question, there were “yes” and “no” quick replies. If someone sent that they were going to be late, there were quick replies like “That’s OK”, etc.
Call me paranoid, but Google owns Android. They can easily read the content of a notification as it’s displayed. They even have a Notification History app where you can see all applications from all apps.
You’re missing the point, there’s no message content sent in the notification, there’s nothing to read.
I’m not talking about the FCM message, I’m talking about Android running on your phone, where the message content is displayed to you.
Same
