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this post was submitted on 11 May 2025
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Privacy
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The amount of trolls in this thread that either try to spew false information intentionally or just have no idea what they are talking about is insane.
If you are worried about what data (including your phone number) law enforcement can recieve (if they have your specific user ID, which is not equal to your phone number) from the Signal company check this: https://propertyofthepeople.org/document-detail/?doc-id=21114562 Tldr: It's the date of registration and last time user was seen online. No other information, Signal just doesn't have any other and this is by design.
If you want to know more about how they accomplish that feat you can check out the sealed sender feature: https://nerdschalk.com/what-is-sealed-sender-in-signal-and-should-you-enable-it/
or the private contact discovery system: https://signal.org/blog/private-contact-discovery/
Also as Signal only requires a valid phone number for registration you might try some of these methods (not sure if they still work): https://theintercept.com/2024/07/16/signal-app-privacy-phone-number/
This shows they do not need our phone numbers but they still demand it.
Despite this, escaping WhatsApp and Discord, anti-libre software, is more important.
False.
edit: it's funny how people downvoting comments about signal's sealed sender being a farce never even attempt to explain what its threat model is supposed to be. (meaning: what attacks, with which adversary capabilities specifically, is it designed to prevent?)
it's being answered in the github thread you linked. Sorry that this is not enough for you but it's enough for most people: "For people who are concerned about this sort of thing, you can enable sealed sender indicators in the settings"
The answers there are only about the fact that it can be turned off and that by default clients will silently fall back to "unsealed sender".
That does not say anything about the question of what attacks it is actually meant to prevent (assuming a user does "enable sealed sender indicators").
This can be separated into two different questions:
The strongest possibly-true statement i can imagine about sealed sender's utility is something like this:
This is a vastly weaker claim than saying that "by design" Signal has no possibility of collecting any information at all besides the famous "date of registration and last time user was seen online" which Signal proponents often tout.
Downvoted as you let them bait you. Escaping WhatsApp and Discord, anti-libre software, is more important.
I don't know what you mean by "bait" here, but...
Escaping to a phone-number-requiring, centralized-on-Amazon, closed-source-server-having, marketed-to-activists, built-with-funding-from-Radio-Free-Asia (for the specific purpose of being used by people opposing governments which the US considers adversaries) service which makes downright dishonest claims of having a cryptographically-ensured inability to collect metadata? No thanks.
(fuck whatsapp and discord too, of course.)
When it's libre software, we're not banned from fixing it.
SimpleX is better
Escaping WhatsApp and Discord, anti-libre software, is most important part.
Signal is a company and a network service and a protocol and some libre software.
Anyone can modify the client software (though you can't actually distribute modified versions via Apple's iOS App Store, for reasons explained below) but if a 3rd party actually "fixed" the problems I've been talking about here then it really wouldn't make any sense to call that Signal anymore because it would be a different (and incompatible) protocol.
Only Signal (the company) can approve of changes to Signal (the protocol and service).
Here is why forks of Signal for iOS, like most seemingly-GPLv3 software for iOS, cannot be distributed via the App Store
Apple does not distribute GPLv3-licensed binaries of iOS software. When they distribute binaries compiled from GPLv3-licensed source code, it is because they have received another license to distribute those binaries from the copyright holder(s).The reason Apple does not distribute GPLv3-licensed binaries for iOS is because they cannot, because the way that iOS works inherently violates the "installation information" (aka anti-tivozation) clause of GPLv3: Apple requires users to agree to additional terms before they can run a modified version of a program, which is precisely what this clause of GPLv3 prohibits.
This is why, unlike the Android version of Signal, there are no forks of Signal for iOS.
The way to have the source code for an iOS program be GPLv3 licensed and actually be meaningfully forkable is to have a license exception like nextcloud/ios/COPYING.iOS. So far, at least, this allows Apple to distribute (non-GPLv3!) binaries of any future modified versions of the software which anyone might make. (Legal interpretations could change though, so, it is probably safer to pick a non-GPLv3 license if you're starting a new iOS project and have a choice of licenses.)
Anyway, the reason Signal for iOS is GPLv3 and they do not do what NextCloud does here is because they only want to appear to be free/libre software - they do not actually want people to fork their software.
Only Signal (the company) is allowed to give Apple permission to distribute binaries to users. The rest of us have a GPLv3 license for the source code, but that does not let us distribute binaries to users via the distribution channel where nearly all iOS users get their software.
Yeah, iOS is not libre software.