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this post was submitted on 11 May 2025
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Privacy
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Is there a quick explanation of what signal actually does? I don't understand the need for a phone number either. Jami doesn't ask for a phone number. It has other deficiencies that make me not want to use it, but those are technical rather than policy, more or less. Similarly, irc (I'm luddite enough to still be using it) doesn't ask for a phone number either. So this is all suspicious. There are a bunch of other things like this too (Element, Matrix, etc.) that I haven't looked into and tbh I don't understand why they exist.
Signal is a messenger service. You can expire messages after a certain amount of time.
They ask for a phone number to limit bots. I used my Google voice number and it worked fine. I like Telegram which banned me after a day of use for using Google Voice.
I get that Signal is a messaging system (not sure if "messenger service" has a specific meaning). What I don't understand is why I'd want to use it instead of any of the million others that are out there. I've never used Signal and don't have the slightest clue about how it operates, but apparently it tries to mess with the contact list on your phone? That sounds bad. I use Nextcloud Chat sometimes and its web design is ugly, but it works ok and you can self-host it fairly easily. It doesn't do anything with your phone contacts. Jami is distributed but (maybe unrelated) I often have trouble getting it to work at all.
It doesn't "mess with your contacts". You can choose to give contacts access if you wish to have secure contact discovery. Contacts are not uploaded.
It's robustly encrypted and quantum secure, without metadata leaks like the sender of a message.
It's recommended by Edward Snowden.
If you want to message someone, have the ability to verify there is no man in the middle attack, have perfect forward secrecy, very strong crypto, use open source software and still have all the conveniences of a modern message app, use signal.
CONTACTS ARE UPLOADED
Robust encryption isn't useful if you don't verify the fingerprint and signal makes that not intuitively.
SIGNAL CLIENT HAS UNFREE SOFTWARE INCLUDED
Contacts are never uploaded
Hashes of some numbers are if you enable contact discovery
Verifying keys is easy, what are you talking about?
Do you mean the client side is open source? What about the server? If you're required to use Signal's server, how do you know it's not disclosing metadata? If you can self-host it, why the phone number?
The idea is you don't need to trust the server
Messages sent don't contain a readable sender field
Mobile numbers may not be necessary long term, architecture depends on accounts being created Witt phone numbers. Usernames were very recently introduced. Soon we may see requirement for phone number dropped, unless related to spam control
You trust the server if you don't verify fingerprints. Signal makes that too difficult.
Sealed sender is a theater that you can enable but still have to trust Intel, aws and the signal server.
The wikipedia article looks informative and I will read through it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signal_(software)
Is spam a serious problem on other messaging systems?
I have received maybe 3 spam messages in many years of use
Spam is a huge problem on other messaging apps I have tried
It's not suspicious. It's been talked about for years. People know exactly what the phone number is used for. Easy discoverability, quick and seamless onboarding of new users by providing a way to bootstrap their social graph, and it being very similar to the process of the other biggest player that people just understand. And spam prevention. The phones are not leaked or used for anything else. The other alternatives exist and you are welcome to onboard the people you want onto them if you think it's simpler.
The code is open, if you don't trust other people and can't read the code to understand then hire someone you trust to validate the claims and assure you. But spreading FUD and saying it's suspicious is not productive to anyone.
I don't understand what you mean about discoverability: is my presence on the network advertised to strangers and spammers? That doesn't sound good. What does the onboarding process look like?
You still haven't said what Signal's advantages are supposed to be over alternatives, though I can guess some (e.g. better/more crypto than irc has). Jami seems conceptually ok, but buggy in implementation. Nextcloud Talk works but is kind of clunky. Matrix is popular though I've never used it: is it the main alternative to Signal these days? I thought it was what all the hipsters had migrated to while luddites like me were still on irc. Jitsi Meet looks nice though again I haven't explored it much. I've been puzzled for a long time that there is so much work in this area yet everything has deficiencies. Are there difficult problems to solve?
If Signal's code is open then of course I'd want to self-host the server. Can I do that? Does that get in the way of the onboarding process you mention? Where does the phone number come in, in that case? If I to use Signal's server, that doesn't sound so open, and normally there's no way for me to verify that it's running the same code that they claim.
I don't see where I'm spreading FUD. Ignoring a question and calling it FUD doesn't invalidate the question.
You can't easily selfhost Signal. They engineered it purposefully to only run on Big Tech Clouds with specific Intel CPUs they put (too much) trust in.
Very interesting, thanks. Do you mean they use SGX (Intel's buggy secure enclave feature)? Any idea what they use it for? If not SGX, do you know what the issue is? AMD Epyc processors have something similar but different, fwiw. If there is such highly secret info on the server though, that makes self-hosting even more important. It also makes the architecture suspect.
Thanks. The more I think about it, the more this seems like outright evil behaviour on Signal's part to pursue user growth, similar to Facebook etc. Imagine that you and your boss are in each other's contacts for obvious work-related reasons. Do you really want Signal notifying your boss that you registered for Signal? For some of us it's fine, but in general it seems like a terrible idea.