Convincing people to use apps such as Signal is hard work and most can’t be convinced. But with those you manage to convince, do you feel happy to talk to them on Signal?
The problem is these people use Signal on Android/IOS which can’t be trusted and IOS has recently been in the news for having a backdoor. And it has also been revealed that american feds are able to read everyone’s push notifications and they do this as mass surveillance.
So not only do you have to convince people to use Signal which is an incredibly difficult challenge. You also have to convince them to go into settings to disable message and sender being included in the push notifications. And then there’s the big question is the Android and IOS operating systems are doing mass surveillance anyway. And many people find it taking a lot of effort to type on the phone so they install Signal on the computer which is a mac or Windows OS.
So I don’t think I feel comfortable sending messages in Signal but it’s better than Whatsapp.
These were some thoughts to get the discussion started and set the context.
“Feel,” “happy,” “comfortable”… Privacy doesn’t care about your feelings.
Speaking of the feds, it was they who funded the creation of Signal, which is one of the reasons it ought not be trusted.
They funded encryption too. Why don’t you stop using that?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/world/national-security/cia-crypto-encryption-machines-espionage/
Wait until they find out who started the internet. Or who runs GPS satellites
And they never spy on people or track them using the Internet or GPS signals?
Why did you think this was a good argument for supporting privacy?
People think that govt developed = bad. It’s a consideration for sure but if anything govt developed is so hopelessly and inherently compromised then many of the measures discussed here are useless for privacy already because they almost all run through internet, a govt created system. Even TOR. But yet here we are anyway because they are still useful systems.
Governments pour tons of time money and effort into secure communication, and not for profit, and we can still take advantage of that advancement with some caution.
History shows that you shouldn’t automatically trust encryption technologies from the US government.
Just throw your whole computer out the window.
There is plenty of space between absolute trust and its contrapositive.
Why don’t you fork Signal? Then, you’ll know the glowies aren’t funding you.
Which lines its libre software source code are malicious? Know what libre software is?
Totally pointless since the chokepoint is Signal’s US-domiciled back-end server, and Signal doesn’t allow you to self-host it.
https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Server/blob/main/LICENSE
That says nothing about what they actually run on their server, or who they allow to look at their database. Most importantly, you can’t self-host signal anyway, so posting the source code for something you can’t verify that they even run, is pointless. They went a whole year one time without updating that repo, until the open source community made an uproar about it, and signal was forced to start updating it again.
I don’t think you’re aware of who wrote Lemmy any more than you were aware of who admins lemmy.ml.
Okay, be a dumbass. Why don’t you fork yourself?
Will people read these comments and leave WhatsApp or will they stop caring about privacy?
Good luck with that 😂
The motivation to do the work, spend time learning the risks and available mitigations, disrupt existing social connections in order to adopt something better, inconvenience friends and family, partially isolate one’s self by avoiding the popular systems… all of these things are part of improving privacy in the real world, and at least for many people, fueled by a person’s feelings. Don’t discount the human factors just because you can’t quantify them.
Yeah, i did use words that express feelings in this topic I created and it was intentional because when people have to deal with something that involves uncertainty or something so advanced they don’t understand it entirely then they can become uncomfortable and scared even though maybe there isn’t something to be scared about or maybe the fear is justified.
My post was intended to be a discussion starter so we can dig into this, get to the truth and help everyone including myself to understand everything better.
Wow, the whole argument of the article is basically: funded in part by US government = bad, and making a lot of assumptions, nothing more.
How laughable, that is not an argument, it’s nothing more than a guessing game, ignoring that there are different parts of government and different objectives can be true.
You have to be kidding right? Championing china, which created a fucking surveillance state and is heavily monitoring the citizens, as an example?
Source for China doing what the US does?
Well, that explains how the NSA keep getting in every so often.
I swear I’ve seen so much pro-signal propaganda recently for some reason.