Who do you want privacy from and why?

That's not a rhetorical question. It matters. If you want privacy from corporations and governments doing mass surveillance because you're against mass surveillance in principle, Signal is great! As long as you don't give janky apps permission to read your notifications, or you limit what Signal shows in its notifications, your device won't leak to those kinds of threat actors. You can't be sure everyone you talk to is as fastidious though.

If the cops, gangsters, or similar are likely to target you and the people you're talking to directly, there's a good chance just using Signal without a security plan won't keep them from getting the contents of the conversation as in this recent incident where the FBI extracted deleted messages from notification logs. To defend against that specific attack, everyone needs to configure Signal to keep message content and contact details out of the notification. Dedicated devices for secure communication set up by someone who knows what they're doing are ideal in this situation. Signal is still a good choice here, but Signal alone won't guarantee privacy.

If you're being targeted by an intelligence agency from a rich country that has allocated a significant budget to surveil you in particular, you're probably screwed. There's plenty of public information about how US government officials and contractors are required to work with classified information to get a sense of how you might try to mount a defense. It's guaranteed to be inconvenient.

And also have 0 friends 😅

Seriously, not a single real life person is going to use something like xmpp.

Signal is the only thing I can get normies to use. Its that, or SMS, fb, or WhatsApp. And i refuse to use those.

I'm a boring rando but I dare defy Dear Leader so I'm probably being watched.

I use XMPP. Don't be hatin'.

agreed and to add to this:

Dedicated devices for secure communication set up by someone who knows what they’re doing are ideal in this situation.

becoming your own expert is unfeasible for 99.999999999999999999999999999999999% of people and expecting it is no different than expecting people to become their own lawyer, dentist, or doctor.

If you’re being targeted by an intelligence agency from a rich country that has allocated a significant budget to surveil you in particular, you’re probably screwed

the bar against protecting yourself from the local police in the united states is MUCH lower than the cia, nsa, mossad, etc. and should be the goal of most projects since it's the most realistic and the most likely to happen; there's next to nothing that can be done against he alternatives.

the alternative is that unfeasible ultra high bar and judges in the united states have a history of holding people in jail for years for contempt of court of not providing passwords or using duress like options on their electronic equipment.

And Signal should take that into account

I was using XMPP two decades ago when it was first introduced (before smartphones) and it was then a great step forward compared to the other IM clients of the time: AOL Instant Messenger, ICQ, MSN Messenger, etc.

It was great that it was going to be interoperable by design, particularly exciting when Google jumped on the XMPP bandwagon with native support in whichever of their dozens of chat apps was current at the time. But like nearly everything that Google runs through Beta, it was eventually scrapped, and they returned to their walled garden.

XMPP has been flailing for a long time and it’s not in a position to grow. Signal is far and away the best balance available today among security, privacy, usability, and network effects meaning other people to communicate with.

Should take what into account?

I'm 80% sure, it does.

Everyone who uses signal and supports it, is falling for this pitch.

No, because it does not reflect the truth. You've to see the full picture.

none of this information ever leaves your client device, so

The phone number you gave to signal to sign up never left your device? Do you truly believe that?

When you send a message through signal, do you actually think "nothing" left your device?

People are not as stupid as these large centralized sites like signal keep telling you they are. Ppl figured out how to make accounts on different services, forums, and platforms since the internet began. It is no more difficult to make a matrix account, or install simpleX than it is anything else. My partner and I figured out simplex within 10 minutes.

The full picture is that Signal has the most important piece of information you can give anyone online: your phone number (which means your real name and current address). Also that they're hosted in the US and have close links to the US defense industry.

If they were competent they would have other career options instead of working for this administration.

No hatin, just saying normies ain't gonna use that.

They don't have phone numbers? I will risk the known exposure through the phone system before anything Meta or LinkedIn. Basically if fb or insta is your contact choice, I am going to phone or sms instead.

Did you mean to link a different article, that one doesn't say anything about defense industry ties (from my quick skim). It does talk about how phone numbers are no longer required when connecting to someone else.

Signal DOES have my phone number, but they can't tell my government anything other than

• yes I use Signal
• yes I connected to it today

This becomes even less important as the platform gets popular. I know some friends who work in healthcare that report that they're switching to Signal (and WhatsApp unfortunately) as an alternative to texting/phone calls for staff/department group chats and non-patient related communications.

Signal DOES have my phone number
but they can’t tell my government anything other than yes I use Signal
yes I connected to it today

This is incorrect. They also have your full name and address by extension, as well as those of everyone you communicate with.

They're also subject to national security letters, meaning the US state can get that info without a warrant.

Just read the first article I posted, it gets into all this.

The 2nd article is the signal CEO Meredith Whitaker interviewing with lawfare, which is a US defense industry think-tank.

The stories I've heard where Signal messages have been extracted or otherwise accessed was from beyond either end. Someone invited a journalist to a private group chat. Someone handed someone else an unlocked device. The most alarming one is apparently Apple uploads every push notification your device gets to their servers. So if you are concerned about privacy there's a feature in Signal to set push notifications to only say "you got a message" and not include the sender or message contents in the notification.

I haven't heard of Signal itself leaking messages.

They do

You can set it to show name + message, name only, or nothing. The last one means that you'd need to open the app to see what you were notified about.

Unfortunately their funding situation is dire, they're shutting down in 90 days

https://getsession.org/donate

You can also set it to hide the sender, but that's overkill for my use case

I read the article in the past, and it is still as flawed as it used to be. You're quite extremist without much legitimate reason. Signal is and will likely stay for the foreseeable time one of the most secure and private messengers.

This is incorrect. They also have your full name and address by extension

I didn't suggest otherwise. This was about whether they can correlate that to additional information. I am already assuming that the US government might try to maliciously compromise the servers, without needing the pretense of national security laws.

I'm not an expert in cryptography or Signals codebase, but my understanding is that the client app uses separate connections to verify the session (something that can be tied to your phone number on a compromised server) and to send a message out. The initial contact discovery process can leak info if you are searching for specific phone numbers, and this could be mitigated by using the QR code or usernames to get an ID directly. The actual pre key fetch is sent as a separate request not tied to your session verification. So outside of timing attacks, it shouldn't let Signal know who I am talking to day to day even if they know that I have connected to the person at one point.

I think it's cool that Simplex and Matrix allow selhosting, and especially Simplex's 2 hop technique. That should make it much more difficult for someone trying to map things out. However if the average person is going to be using the default servers, I don't see how a compromised server is any less of a problem than with Signal's ones.

I recommend Signal to non-technical users trying to get away from Facebook/Instagram/whatsapp. I might start recommending Simplex too if it gets popular enough and goes through a similar level of scrutiny that Signal had. I'm already comfortable using a variety of chat platforms / self hosting for myself.

The lack of a phone number requirement does limit the extent of social graph mapping. I hope signal will do away with that requirement as they've promised to for some time. The risk though is spam, which is already a problem now that signal is getting popular.

Just read the first article I posted, it gets into all this.

I did look over it again, and I still find the CIA section to be silly. I'll refer back to these old comments from myself and someone else:

https://lemmy.ca/comment/5401873

https://lemmy.ca/post/16397504/7661724

The 2nd article is the signal CEO Meredith Whitaker interviewing with lawfare, which is a US defense industry think-tank.

Again, I would say this is a big leap. The CEO agreeing to an interview with a think tank that has ties to the defense industry is not the same thing as Signal having ties to the defense industry. She has done many interviews talking about Signal, with a variety of orgs of different ownership and politics

Signal for people I know IRL, Simplex for those I don't.

Oh, I'm not saying people can't figure it out, but most normies won't try on principle or something. Hell, I've gotten pushback from software engineers when asking them to do Matrix. Signal is known enough that most normies will use it, though, and it at least is not explicitly known to be centrally backdoored in terms of the encryption like a Whatsapp, which in my experience is the other option normies will bear.

If you don't care about sharing your phone number with Signal and a third-party company (Signal refuses to state what company it is) that send the text message with the activation code to you. And if you don't care that everything will be saved on servers maintained by Amazon in USA.

Then yes, Signal is the right app for you even in 2026.

But if you do care (and you should) about your phone number and the location of your data, you should focus on something more privacy like XMPP (Snikket would be the easiest way to setup your own server) and SimpleX.

XMPP (for an example Snikket) uses OMEMO and OMEMO is based on Signal Protocol.

When you register with Signal, they do know your phone number. This gives them the information that "the person who owns this phone number is registered with our service." That is not linked in any way to what leaves the client when you send a message because, I cannot stress this enough, you don't send your phone number or identify yourself in any way to Signal's servers when you send a message. Please take a look at the client source code yourself.

I won't be replying anymore, have a great one! There are better things to use my PhD in cryptography for.

Yes it does ( did it like 5 weeks ago)

I had 3 back then but because my dump android stops it from running in the background. Now I left with 1 legit friend, I also force my parents to use it :)

Seriously, not a single real life person is going to use something like xmpp.

True but I also don't want to be close with npc iphone/instaram users anyway

So true. My non-technical friend asked about more private ways to communicate after things started to go bad where we live, and she had no problems understanding SimpleX. The actual user experience is a lot like FB Messenger, IMO.

Whenever Signal advocates chime in, they never help beat the allegation of being a cult that cannot be reasoned with.

Most normies aren't using Signal either, they're all on Whatsapp and fb messenger. You'd be asking them to switch platforms to use Signal just as you would with any other app.

One of the most sus things about Signal is the cult following it has. I really can't think of any other chat app that will have people coming out of the woodwork advocating for it while telling you not to use anything else. There's absolutely nothing special about Signal that would warrant this. It's at best a mediocre user experience, it still handles a lot of things like switching devices really poorly. It's open source in name only. There's just no reason why it should be this popular on its own merits.

IIRC Android has the same issue with push notifications, if you really care about privacy you should disable showing any content from any messaging app in your notifications unless you want Google or Apple to collect it

I successfully have multiple normies in my life on Signal. The no account/password is a big selling point. It's not perfect, but it's better than iMessage or Whatsapp, which are the two "this is good enough" options I see normies in my life wanting to use.

Vast majority of people, outside a tiny technical niche, aren't on Signal. And if you're going to get people to switch anyways, then why choose Signal when there are far better alternatives around.

Short 8 min video of actually reading the Privacy Policy:

https://youtu.be/RJR59AGsO10

My sister and wife and parents aren't going to use Matrix or SimpleX. The no account or password, you just install on your phone and it's like iMessage basically sells them in a way I could NEVER get enough buy in for anything else. The way I see it, Signal's primary problem is the metadata availability, but the government knows I talk to my family, presumably, what I want to hide is the contents, which are as far as anybody knows, E2E as long as you're not using the Israeli Molly, but evil, app the Trump admin uses. I have tried since Threema to get these people on better platforms, Signal is a win in this case.

Using Element is no harder than Signal.

I agree. But I literally have software engineer bros who whine like little bitches about Matrix. I'm not stanning Signal, I try to Matrix where possible, but there are people in my life where Signal is the high watermark of what they will even try because they heard about it via Waltz accidentally putting Jeff Goldberg in the chat and there's no account setup.

Personally, I have yet to see anybody who was willing to use Signal whom I couldn't get to install the Element app instead. 🤷

🤷 this is not my lived experience with my normies, especially since it was in the news. Love your posts, btw, big fan of your content here on Lemmy.

Thanks, nice to know the posts are appreciated. :)

You’re misunderstanding what they’re freaked out about.

TBH lots of people with real experience in computer security have trouble understanding what signal skeptics are complaining about because people who understand what’s going on just say “well… yeah. Duh.”

They’re concerned about the possibility of lack of anonymity being combined with social graphing to establish cause for investigation.

When the service corroborates a user to a phone number it doesn’t matter how legitimately private and secure the data transmitted between clients of the service is, the government of the jurisdiction can demand the information about the user and phone number and use that to establish their own legal cause to use more intensive surveillance methods, infiltrate organizations and tie a user of signal to an identity with voting records & other publicly (and less publicly) available identifying information.

People want to use the cloak of anonymity to avoid this outcome and so complain about signal not being anonymous. Of course, they might not have the understanding and language to recognize that’s their concern so it isn’t always clear.

Signal doesn’t claim to be anonymous, so a person who understands that distinction will just get pissed off at ding dongs trying to drive screws with a hammer and a person who doesn’t understand that distinction gets pissed off that anyone would sell hammers at the same store as screws.

Computer security and crypto needs a Flowers for Algernon so people can learn how little they know and not a Matrix that invites people to the secret world.

This issue and its solution will be the same as with any other app notifications.

That’s why I use UnifiedPush

For sure, I do understand the concerns. Government subpoenas and metadata leaking are real problems, and it's hard to design algorithms well in order to minimize the leakage. But Signal is designed in such a way that the only information that they can possibly collect on any user is (1) phone number, (2) account creation time, and (3) time of last connection with their server. This is true even if they are compelled to release information about their users, even under duress. This has played out in court many times, and Signal is unable to comply with government demands for any information other than exactly these three things: https://signal.org/bigbrother/

I've done 5 years of research into designing private messaging systems specifically, and the more I learn about Signal the more I believe that they're really the gold standard of privacy, to the degree that it's shocking that they're a non-profit and provide their service for free. Knowing how hard it is to design a secure messenger, and how few eyes are actually on most open source projects, people should always be cautious about smaller projects promising stronger privacy guarantees.

The other concerns you brought up (anonymity, targeted government investigations, device compromise, etc.) are super valid and important. But I think Signal also does the best of any private messenger in their UI/UX design, to be as clear as possible about what they keep private. At some point, it's not clear to me how Signal would protect users who (for example) use their full name and think they're anonymous, or users who don't put a password on their phone. They've really nailed the "private messenger" part, and I'm just trying to emphasize that the concerns in this comment thread and linked github essay are mostly unfounded, thankfully.

This is what people don't get when it comes to that story about the journalist. You literally have to go out of your way to invite someone into a group chat. That does not happen on accident on Signal.

I had to explain that to a few people who heard that story and were super skeptical about Signal being dangerous. Which is ironic because the same people would be using messenger and think nothing of it.