Thanks. I'm not a sophisticated Android user and so far have just stayed with installing stuff from F-droid. If the official build matches the F-droid build, that's great. At some point I want to spend some time bringing up Android build tools, but I have too much other stuff going on right now.
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.
Telling the govt that you registered for Signal sounds like a bad failure as far as I'm concerned, e.g. if you are a user in a repressive regime. Do you think Trump would like to get his hands on a list of all the Signal users in the US? Probably yes. What would he do with the list? IDK but it has to be bad. So it should be an objective of Signal to make it impossible for anyone to create such a list.
Anyway, it sounds like Signal has wised up and is getting rid of the phone number requirement. I don't understand why people here keep defending the misfeature. I've heard such things explained as "system justification" but I still don't understand it. All of us make poor decisions all the time, but we should at least make some effort to recognize them, and fix them when possible.
To truly be safe from Signal’s influence you would need to audit the source code and build it yourself.
Usually I only install APK's from F-Droid, which always builds its apps from source, rather than using the developer's APK. I'm uncomfortable that Signal doesn't seem to be on F-droid, and I'm in fact hesitant to install it from anywhere else. I'm not currently set up to build Android apps myself. I'm a fairly unsophisticated Android user.
They are overlapping areas, but they are “two completely different things”. They overlap by sharing common goals, not by being interchangeable.
They aren't interchangeable but they intersect. Completely different means they are disjoint.
it proudly advertises you as a signal user to other signal users
That sounds terrible, a private message service shouldn't advertise anything to anyone. If I subscribe to a subversive magazine, it shouldn't advertise me to other subscribers. It's a terrible invasion if they do. Signal and PGP are both comparable to subversive magazines in that regard, even if the PGP manual tried to say the opposite.
I think most of us these days recognize that the whole concept of public key directories and signature chains on PGP keys was a conceptual error in how people thought about privacy back then (they only cared about encrypting message content). We like to think we know better now, but maybe we don't.
Okay? And? In this hypothetical world where Signal offered anonymity but still tied you to your number for other practical reasons, then you’re be correct that it would be a privacy concern.
According to Wikipedia, they do record some of that info and report it to the government when required. In fact there is further disclosure to them (they might not retain or use the info, but they do receive it) every time you connect to the Signal server.
Anyway the Wikipedia article indicates they have introduced usernames as an alternative to phone numbers, so they have finally acknowledged the problem and done something about it.
Your asserting "two completely different things" doesn't make it true. Privacy and anonymity are not synonyms but they are overlapping areas. Also ISTM you are redefining terms to suit your purposes. Anonymity to me means the message recipient can't tell who you are. If a THIRD PARTY (the server operator) can ALSO tell who you are, that's a privacy failure, not just an anonymity one.
Why does it take so much storage per user? Does it have video uploads or anything like that? A user account should basically just be a row in a database.
In August 2022, Signal notified 1900 users that their data had been affected by the Twilio breach including user phone numbers and SMS verification codes.[105] At least one journalist had his account re-registered to a device he did not control as a result of the attack.[106] ...
This mandatory connection to a telephone number (a feature Signal shares with WhatsApp, KakaoTalk, and others) has been criticized as a "major issue" for privacy-conscious users who are not comfortable with giving out their private number.[142] A workaround is to use a secondary phone number.[142] The ability to choose a public, changeable username instead of sharing one's phone number was a widely-requested feature.[142][144][145] This feature was added to the beta version of Signal in February 2024.[146]
Using phone numbers as identifiers may also create security risks that arise from the possibility of an attacker taking over a phone number.[142] A similar vulnerability was used to attack at least one user in August 2022, though the attack was performed via the provider of Signal's SMS services, not any user's provider.[105] The threat of this attack can be mitigated by enabling Signal's Registration Lock feature, a form of two-factor authentication that requires the user to enter a PIN to register the phone number on a new device.[147]
It's a substack (ugh), but you can click "no thanks" under the email field and it takes you to the article, which is by Ryan Grim. The article is somewhat hard to understand though, as it jumps between a few different topics.
That is a pretty weird post that doesn't make much sense, but I remember meeting Moxie and asking him about Android security and being surprised at how defensive he was about it. Is Signal the app he was working on? That helps somewhat. I get them confused with each other.
The Signal app doesn't appear to be on F-droid, which is a bit discomforting.
The claim is that Signal's phone verification step doesn't cause privacy problems because Signal (purportedly) doesn't retain the phone numbers after verification. That claim is falsified because the phone carrier stores the call record even if Signal doesn't. They store it because of the same law that makes them turn it over to Big Brother on demand. The phone verification step is, therefore, a privacy problem. Obviously there are similar issues with IP routing, but at least I can use a VPN with an endpoint in another country.
Is there a url for the history? Or for a good answer about the phone numbers? If the topic keeps recurring and the answers don't satisfy people, that suggests that there is no good answer, and that there are possibly misaligned interests between Signal and its users.
Are you saying I have to literally rebuild and distribute my own client APK if I want to use my own server? There's no "settings" in the existing client where you say what server you want to use, like every email client has? That sounds obnoxious.
Thanks. I'm not a sophisticated Android user and so far have just stayed with installing stuff from F-droid. If the official build matches the F-droid build, that's great. At some point I want to spend some time bringing up Android build tools, but I have too much other stuff going on right now.