On its 10th anniversary, Signal’s president wants to remind you that the world’s most secure communications platform is a nonprofit. It’s free. It doesn’t track you or serve you ads. It pays its engineers very well. And it’s a go-to app for hundreds of millions of people.
Law enforcement doesn’t request data frequently enough in order to build a social graph. Also they probably don’t need to as Google and Apple likely have your contacts.
They don’t need to request data. They have first-class access to the data themselves. Snowden informed us of this over a decade ago.
Saying that it is somehow a tool for mass surveillance is frankly wrong.
Signal per se is not the mass surveillance tool. Its dependence on Google is the mass surveillance tool.
However, phone numbers are great for ease of use and help prevent spam.
And there’s nothing wrong with allowing that ease-of-use flow for users that don’t need anonymity. The problem is disallowing anonymous users.
I’m not speaking of hard dependence as in “the app can’t work without it.” I’m speaking to the default behavior of the Signal application:
It connects to Google
It does not make efforts to anonymize traffic
It does makes efforts to prevent anonymous sign-ups
Molly FOSS choosing different defaults doesn’t change the fact that the “Signal” client app, which accounts for the vast majority of clients within the network, is dependent on Google.
And in either case – using Google’s Firebase system, or using Signal’s websocket system – the metadata under discussion is still not protected; the NSA doesn’t care if they’re wired into Google’s data centers or Signal’s. They’ll be snooping the connections either way. And in either case, the requirement of a phone number is still present.
Perhaps I should restate my claim:
Signal per se is not the mass surveillance tool. Its dependence on Google design choices of (1) not forcing an anonymization overlay, and (2) forcing the use of a phone number, is the mass surveillance tool.
They don’t need to request data. They have first-class access to the data themselves. Snowden informed us of this over a decade ago.
Signal per se is not the mass surveillance tool. Its dependence on Google is the mass surveillance tool.
And there’s nothing wrong with allowing that ease-of-use flow for users that don’t need anonymity. The problem is disallowing anonymous users.
Signal is not dependent on Google. Also to my knowledge Signal isn’t part of AT&T
It literally is though.
If that were the case Molly FOSS wouldn’t exist
I’m not speaking of hard dependence as in “the app can’t work without it.” I’m speaking to the default behavior of the Signal application:
Molly FOSS choosing different defaults doesn’t change the fact that the “Signal” client app, which accounts for the vast majority of clients within the network, is dependent on Google.
And in either case – using Google’s Firebase system, or using Signal’s websocket system – the metadata under discussion is still not protected; the NSA doesn’t care if they’re wired into Google’s data centers or Signal’s. They’ll be snooping the connections either way. And in either case, the requirement of a phone number is still present.
Perhaps I should restate my claim: