Hey Folks! Someone in my family (Person A), has talked to a guy, who is working in the tech world, about if it make sense to use Signal, over Messenger, Snap, WhatsApp, with privacy in mind. The tech guy said, there is no difference, and that its not making sense to use it and that its almost the same. I know Signal is discussed alot here, but im now looking for some arguments, and facts to tell the one from my family, that the tech guy is wrong. What arguments can i use, why is Signal better in privacy, then the other alternatives? Person A, has always been sceptical about me beeing so privacy minded, and A thinks that there is nothing to do to protect, and is one of thoese saying : I have nothing to hide.
Edit: thank you for the help
@FriedRice@lemmy.ml Do you still require help?
No thanks.
Here’s my main argument for more private services (I try to make all my arguments short).
According to a study done by proton, a single company makes a minimum of $200 dollars off of each person, each year. Of course, they probably gain more money via clandestine deals or the government buying data directly to get around the 4th amendment.
But that money, doesn’t go solely to the companies dedicated to collecting data, or those parts of other companies. It goes to lobbying the government to strip away privacy further.
And then I have two endings, depending on the situation:
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Of course, I recognize that in today’s connected world, I can’t get privacy unless I go live in the woods. But I can decrease the amount of money companies make off my data, which I do like.
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Organizations like the EFF, lobby on the other side, for more privacy for us. But they are opposed by when massive companies like google also lobby. So when I deny google $100, that’s money they can’t use to lobby anymore. Rather than thinking of it as denying google money, think of it as making a donation to the EFF, that they use to ensure our rights are in place.
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WhatsApp tracks when and who you talk with.
Thar information is used to put people on government target lists and kill them.
Show them this: https://techcrunch.com/2025/01/22/whatsapp-wins-reprieve-in-india-over-user-data-sharing/
The dispute began when WhatsApp required users to accept expanded data sharing with Meta’s platforms or risk losing access to the messaging service. While European users can opt out of such sharing, Indian users cannot — a distinction that regulators found problematic.
Meta doesn’t know what you’re talking about, because WhatsApp is e2ee. But they know:
- who are you talking to
- when
- how often
- what else were you doing before/during/after the talk
- links that are shared (the preview fetch is not e2ee afaik)
These are all valuable metadata and given enough of it, they can even infer what you were talking about. Target you with ads on their other platforms (but rumors are that WhatsApp will have ads inside eventually)
(the preview fetch is not e2ee afaik)
Technically, it is, but end to end encryption only covers the data between the ends, and not what one of the ends chooses to do with it. If one end of the conversation chooses to log the conversation in an insecure way, the conversation itself might technically be encrypted, but the contents of the conversation can be learned by another. Or if one end simply chooses to forward a message to a new party not part of the original conversation.
The link previews are happening outside of the conversation, and that action can be seen by people like the owner of the website, your ISP, and maybe WhatsApp itself (if configured in that way, not sure if it does).
So end to end isn’t a panacea. You have to understand how it fits into the broader context of security and threat models.
For the purposes of the average person the tech guy in your op is absolutely 100% correct.
All the platforms listed use transport encryption and that’s enough to avoid mitm surveillance which is enough for most people.
Most people’s “threat model” is the police or a pi. All the apps listed including signal have to comply with orders from American police and have “sidechain attacks” that involve stuff like getting some member of the groupchat’s device and scrolling up or tricking someone into giving up sensitive information.
Yeah, but when signal complies they give date you made your account and when you last accessed. And that’s it. Probably much less than the others give.
show them a picture of zuckersuckers face and ask if they would trust him with your secrets
Just check news, Paragon case in Italy or other past security scandal.
Here are 28 arguments for you to use.
that’s a lot of arguments
These are not designed to penetrate disinformation.
WhatsApp fails to include a libre software licence text file. We do NOT control it, anti-libre software.
This is the most efficient attack and defence. Do NOT copy what others are saying or you WILL get trapped.
I think that this is a pretty good reason.
If the billionaires are using it for privacy, then it is likely the best one.
I mean, how much do you wanna bet that they all had a private dinner with the other billionaires that own other apps and had a private conversation about whether their messages are actually private and able to be hid from the government?
Send them both a bunch of videos from Naomi Brockwell (NBTV). Or buy them each a copy of her book
Practically speaking, there’s a huge difference.
RCS/iMessage are great. They’re a huge upgrade over SMS, however, the E2E statements they make aren’t really verifiable to the degree necessary to call them secure. They also require hardware compatibility, software compatibility, environment compatibility (root breaks RCS) as well as network compatibility so the pool of devices that work both ways with RCS is still pretty small. It’s frankly a mess. Default settings for most RCS/iMessage applications will attempt to send via E2E protocols and if it fails, it defaults back to sending SMS. So now your super secret content was just sent basically over cleartext if the protocol send fails. lol
Realistically speaking, he’s right. There’s no difference. People don’t casually message information which is important enough to require perfect forward secrecy. So at the end of the day choose which works best for you and if you do dumb shit like sending credit card and social security numbers over clearnet, then prepare to have your anus widened.
I personally prefer running an MTProto proxy on top of Telegram. I control the proxy, so I can view where the network traffic is going in transit for the most part. Is MTProto perfect? No. But it’s vastly improved since previous independent audits and it’s “good enough.”
If critically sensitive information has to touch a device with internet access then you need a mature security protocol like PGP or some other shared key cryptography so you can verifiably ensure you’re talking to whom you’re supposed to be talking to. If that’s something you’re interested in, give Keybase a try. It’s a really great platform built around a really great technology (PGP). The mobile application comes with a chat option that uses your PGP key to symmetrically encrypt your chat messages using Scrypt (with PBKDF2) making it significantly more secure than any other option mentioned here.
Signal is the best alternative to Meta messaging apps and to Snapchat for normies.
Signal is not the answer. Signal’s backend is essentially closed-source, and to my knowledge none of their binaries are reproducible with the code available. If you really want privacy and security in E2EE, you want somethjng that’s completely open-source (front and backend), and can be self-hosted entirely. Matrix is this.
If we can’t self host Signal, it isn’t much better than WhatsApp.
