Privacy

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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

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Signal Is More Than Encrypted Messaging. Under Meredith Whittaker, It’s Out to Prove Surveillance Capitalism Wrong (www.wired.com)

submitted 2 months ago by minnix@lemux.minnix.dev to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

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[–] notabot@lemm.ee 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I agree that them having users' phone numbers isn't ideal. There are other identifiers they could use that would work just as well. However, both the client and server are open source, so you can build, at least the client, yourself. If you can content yourself that it does not leak your ID when sending messages, then you don't need to trust the server as it does not have the information to build a graph of your contacts. Sealed sender seems to have been announced in 2018, so it's had time to be tested.

Don't get me wrong, the fact they require a phone number at all is a huge concern, and the reason I don't really use it much, but the concern you initially stated was addressed years ago and you can build the client yourself to validate that.

[–] yogthos@lemmy.ml 5 points 2 months ago

Except that Signal won't allow third party clients to talk to their server, and the server doesn't federate. So, Signal being open source is completely meaningless in practice. If you want to use their network then you have to use the client they ship against the server they run, and only people operating this server actually know what it's doing.