I currently use Telegram for my friends and family, but have reluctantly come to the conclusion that the UK Government is either reaching agreement for backdoors with messaging services, or is trying its hardest to.
I’m also on Element/Matrix. Before I try to get my contacts to join me on there, should I be aware of any privacy issues or is that a good place to head?
But you should also be aware that Signal does not federate, so the company can be bought. They have control over all accounts and the servers, without easy way to migrate away again. So it might just be another trap.
Try to use federated services (like matrix), they are more robust against hostile take overs.
The company (Signal Messenger LLC) is fully owned by Signal Foundation, a 501©3 non profit organization.
I generally like this idea, and I also use federated services for things like social media, that’s why we’re having a discussion here on Lemmy. But it introduces some issues with private messaging, like lack of reliability, which sucks if you want to use Matrix as your primary messenger, as well as metadata leaks. Federation is not always the answer, and in my opinion definitely not when it comes private and secure messaging.
Probably around 80-90% of Matrix users are on the matrix.org homeserver, so it’s absolutely not as decentralized and resilient as you think it is.
OpenAI is also non-profit. Not really an argument.
Well, the goal is that moving to your own server, will not mean that you will loose access to all your contacts. Which makes moving instances much simpler. If Matrix gets a hostile take-over, your don’t really need to reach a critical mass for an alternative server.
At least (to my knowledge) the Signal messages are decrypted on the client end, so buying the company doesn’t give them automatic access to messages.
Having said that, I’m sure a hostile new owner could update the app to decrypt and then send the messages as plaintext to the servers if they wanted…
Well, you can still insert client side decryption into the app.
But it isn’t really about the messages, it is about the control of the servers and the accounts. You cannot easily move away from their servers, because you will lose your contacts. This gives the people controlling the servers power over you. A sort of vendor lockin.
That’s why all clients are fully open-source. You can also use a fork like Molly.
AFAIK, Signal does not want anyone to use alternative clients, has that changed?
As far as I know moxie, signals lead dev, considers only the use of the officially build and distributed client authorized to use their servers.
So if they ever manage to detect someone using their services with an alternative client, they might delete your account.
https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/07/signal-app-maker-rebuts-criticism-of-dev-direction-by-calling-for-more-community-help/
Moxie has resigned a few years ago. The article you linked to is 9 years old, Signal leadership has changed a bunch of times since. Signal can’t detect that you’re running an alternative client, because that check would require them to include some new code in the official client. Even if they did this, they couldn’t just ban anyone who’s client doesn’t pass the check, since it could just be an older version of the official client. They could force everyone to use the official app, but they really have no reason to invest time and effort into enforcing this. Molly is only available for Android, and it isn’t even on the Play Store or the official F-Droid repo, so the user base naturally won’t be as big.
This is such a bad take it seems like deliberate misinformation.
Signal is open-source software maintained by a non-profit. User data is not stored on Signal servers, they have no way to access messages as they are stored and encrypted on your phone. If the Signal Foundation were revealed as bad actors then the open-source code could be forked to a new project.
Feel free to fully evaluate their code here: https://github.com/signalapp
That’s the signal app. The software which runs on their servers is proprietary.
No it’s not: https://github.com/signalapp/signal-server
TIL. Was it in the past?
I’m with you on this, I strongly recall there was some sort of not fully open source portion of Signal at least at one point in time.
Edit: ya, they weren’t updating server for awhile, so while there is an open source server, they definitely weren’t running that code for awhile, and may not be running it today. Granted since the decryption happens client side, it shouldn’t matter what the server does to some extent.
https://www.androidpolice.com/2021/04/06/it-looks-like-signal-isnt-as-open-source-as-you-thought-it-was-anymore/
There was a period where they didn’t push changes to the repo, but all the code was released afterwards and it’s been getting regular updates ever since. But it also doesn’t matter at all, since the Signal client is designed in a way that avoids putting trust in the server. Signal servers could literally be run by the NSA and it wouldn’t matter, as everything is fully end-to-end encrypted, including metadata. The Signal protocol was also updated to use post-quantum cryptography in 2023.
No, the server is on the github account linked above as well. The repo is here.
Signal however doesn’t federate and does not generally support third-party clients.