Signal doesn’t “heavily use Google services”. They only use proprietary libraries and integrations for 2 purposes: Donations and push notifications. Signal uses the platform’s native way of handling push notifications, on iOS it’s APNs and on Android it’s FCM. This is also the reason why it’s not available on F-Droid. You can use a fork of the app like Signal-FOSS or Molly. These remove all proprietary dependencies and you can download them from their custom F-Droid repositories.
I have used it (molly-foss)but haven’t in a while, just waiting for it to enable OSM location sharing to switch back to it. Didn’t know about accrescent. What’s the deal about it compared to droidify or f-droid?
I have to be misunderstanding what you’re saying because it sounds like you’re happy that app shares your location by default? Or do you mean it uses that format by default when you decide to share a location?
I meant that it uses the OSM “format” when I decide to share it voluntarily. That totally makes sense for me. I don’t want to be sharing no Google links.
The whitepaper explains it in detail. Closed source doesn’t mean worse by default. In a lot of cases the opposite since professionals were hired and paid for their work and the company thinks they have an edge on the competition. Open source is more of a grab bag. Commercial use of open source is plagued by abandoned projects and lack of support obligations, even though it might be better in certain instances.
Closed source does mean it’s worse by default because we can’t verify what the app does. The only things we really know about Whatsapp are:
Meta is scanning your texts before the message is sent. Back when I last used it you could easily verify this by typing a url and having the app underline the url for you.
Meta is collecting an enormous amount of Metadata. This can also be verified by checking the permissions the app has and by various people that have monitored the background activity of the app.
Meta is using the Signal protocol to send the message. However, as previously explained this means nothing because they already scanned the message prior to sending it.
So with no way to look at the code we have to assume that Meta is collecting and storing the messages and their metadata.
Most industry standard software that people use in their jobs is closed source. When you watch movies or listen to music or play video games you’re supporting proprietary software. Same with finance and basically any office job. Niche IT jobs are the exception but I’ve been in enterprise IT for 20 years and this is just how it is in a capitalist economy. I’d prefer for public ownership of technology platforms but it’s basically reduced to a consumption model within the current system. Like the platforms people consume media through isn’t very significant, which the open source community puts a lot of ideological importance on. Most open source projects are also abandoned and become obsolete too quickly. I’ve basically been relying on the same set of proprietary Adobe software for part of my income since the 90s, can’t name an open source alternative that does what I need it to do or has this longevity even though I’d prefer it.
Btw a way you can verify the security of a chat app is by reading case docs from law enforcement about what’s required to obtain communications through said platform. With whatsapp the closest they can get to message content is by retreiving cache from the iPhone chatsearch database, and metadata from WhatsApp about who sent a message to whom and when but not the message contents. Retrieval of WhatApp messages through proprietary security forensics software is limited to how certain phone models and OSs locally cache messages basically. This applies to different platforms the same way though and isn’t something special about WhatsApp or Meta. The unique thing to Meta is how quickly they respond to law enforcement requests about metadata collection.
Well, she's not wrong that we need more influential people fighting back against this latest push in the global coordinated effort to put an end to communications privacy. It's really quite alarming how little attention it seems to get most of the time. Civil society seemed much more robust when it fought off similar attacks in the 1990s. I do hope that the "VC community" isn't our only hope.
But of course Signal can’t interoperate with another messaging platform, without them raising their privacy bar significantly
Signal is supposed to be free software. You could probably manage to interoperate at least with other operators of actual Signal-Server instances, if you wanted to.
There’s already something like this and it’s called SimpleX. Messages are sent through relays and a very familiar form of ratcheting encryption is used.
It’s still in its infancy, but anyone can run and use their own relay.
Simplex is a great example of why trying to force apps to work with each over is bad for a number of reasons.
Simplex chat would be massively compromised as a messager if it was required to work with Telegram. Imagine the amount of spam you would get if nothing else.
I run a matrix server that interoperates with signal, whatsapp and discord so people who need to use those platforms are able to use one app instead of three and also keep their info private.
I‘m talking about apps like discord or whatsapp that have a lot of info on you when you open them. The open source clients are a lot less data hungry afaik.
But yes, the encryption between the apps is not seamless so you‘d need to activate encryption again for this if you want it.
Maybe. If you communicate on Matrix with someone who is bridged from Discord, you have now given Matrix data to Discord and Discord data to Matrix. Which isn’t great for privacy at all.
Granted, I guess you don’t have to use the Discord app at that point, but the extra data is a server-side treasure trove regardless.
I dont know where you got that info from but afaik the most data collection is automated and does not include manually sifting through stuff. Having a discord bot does not give discord the info from a persons matrix account. Its the persons decision if they want to name the matrix account the same (which they shouldnt).
Well, it’s not all your Matrix data, but if you don’t trust Discord with writing an app that runs client-side, I’m not sure why it’s helpful to trust them with holding onto your conversions with other Discord users either…
I’ve also run a Matrix server and I can tell you from experience… You shouldn’t trust me with your conversations. Even if I was a good friend, I’m definitely not a security professional!
You can’t keep the admin out of your Matrix chats and bridge them to Signal (or Discord) though. Either they sit around effectively unencrypted on a server that’s built to hold data and especially metadata forever (which is one data breach away from being everybody’s data) or the user has to just not use Signal bridges.
I guess if you’re comfortable with that it’s fine, but I’m really not.
Thats what I meant. The admin is the person that most always has your data but data breaches are other people getting in which is not that hard to prevent. You dont have to run faster than the bear… just faster than the guy next to you.
For signal we assume that native connections are e2ee, for whatsapp I‘m less sure thats really the case and for discord we know that nothing is encrypted.
So yes, if someone got into the server and started poking around undetected, one might have their signal texts laid bare. I‘m pretty sure the likelyhood isnt as high as a phone getting hacked, especially for small servers that are obscure.
And it turns right around into my point: aside from signal, there is no such thing as privacy and discord and whatsapp should at best not be executed on your phone. And no, the person using a bridge on a server that is not their own is not the person that correctly sandboxes the app or roots their phone.
free software doesn’t necessarily mean federating with other services.
They have stated their reasons why they don’t wanna do it. You might disagree with them or not. But the technology they built is still open. Anybody could take what they created and use it as a foundation that does federate.
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