Privacy

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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.

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Downsides of Signal alternatives compared to Signal? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 7 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I'm thinking of the things listed on the Privacy Guides real-time communication section

https://www.privacyguides.org/en/real-time-communication/

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

Read the post by signal. Note the use of the word "plaintext".

we don’t have a plaintext record of your contacts, social graph, profile name, location, group memberships, groups titles, group avatars, group attributes, or who is messaging whom.

Whenever someone qualifies a statement like this, without clarifying, it's clear they're trying to obfuscate something.

I don't need to dig into the technical details to know it's not as secure as they like to present themselves.

Thanks. I didn't realize they were so disingenuous. This also explains why they stopped supporting SMS - it didn't transit their servers (they'd have to add code to capture SMS, which people would notice).

They now seem like a honeypot.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

They are very much not. Anyone who tells you this is a state influencer or someone who believed a state influencer.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Saying something has the capabilities of a honeypot, is the correct thing to do when we're assessing our threat model.

Is it a honey pot? I don't know. It's unknowable. We have to acknowledge the the actual capabilities of the software as written and the data flows and the organizational realities.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 7 months ago (1 children)

My concern is people stay away from Signal in favor of unencrypted privacy nightmares. It happened with DDG a while back where I knew people who used Google because DDG had privacy issues. It sounds dumb but it is a true story.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago

Sure. I still encourage people to use signal. Most people don't have a threat model that makes the honey pot scenario a viable threat. In this thread we are talking about its downsides, which is healthy to do from time to time. Acknowledging capabilities is a good exercise.