this post was submitted on 21 Sep 2021
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I'm using Signal, but after I found out that it's not as privacy-friendly as it claims, I'm uneasy about sharing my address there. I trust the person who asked for my address, but not the service. What's a safe way to share? I was thinking of something like a self-destructing pastebin, but surely you have better ideas.

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[โ€“] PM_ME_UR_PCAPS@lemmy.ml 39 points 3 years ago (1 children)

Which of Signals privacy claims are false?

[โ€“] dessalines@lemmy.ml 8 points 3 years ago (3 children)

Pretty much everything about it is unverifiable, because its a centralized service and you ultimately don't know what the server is running. Contrast that with self-hostable apps which must pass verifiability checks, because people can host their own instance.

[โ€“] ancom@lemmy.ml 33 points 3 years ago (1 children)

Clients are open source. Independent clients exists and they work. So the server must kind of do what signal claims, otherwise those devs would notice.

[โ€“] dessalines@lemmy.ml 4 points 3 years ago (2 children)

You have no idea what the server is running. It has your phone number, ie your real name and address, and it knows who you sent messages to.

[โ€“] Trapping5341@lemmy.world 34 points 1 year ago (1 children)

But it doesn't though. That information has been subpoenaed from signal in the past. They don't have access to it to give. This is public information.

[โ€“] ironsoap@lemmy.one 13 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

As comment in thread points out, the subpoenaed info was essentially useless.

[โ€“] Trapping5341@lemmy.world 11 points 1 year ago

Yeah that's exactly my point. Other guys was listing all these things the signal has stored but they really just don't want access to any of it.

[โ€“] gon@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

IDK if this an issue on my app specifically, but it looks like you put the wrong things in the parentheses there.

[โ€“] 9tr6gyp3@lemmy.world 12 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)
[โ€“] shrugal@lemmy.world 29 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

This is suspicion on the level of "you can't be sure reality didn't just pop into existence 10 seconds ago". You can never be 100% sure of what others are doing on their hardware, or of anything really, especially if other people are involved. Your chat partners could leak all your chats and metadata for all you know!

What we do know is that Signal is operated by a non-profit foundation, their client and protocol are open source and considered the gold standard for privacy by pretty much every expert on the subject, they had multiple independent audits and a very good track record, they were subpoenaed and couldn't comply because they didn't have the requested data. That's about as good as you can get.

[โ€“] Azzu@lemm.ee 24 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Matrix and even Signal you reject for some reason work fine with no one being able to see the content of your message except the one you sent it to.

[โ€“] JDubbleu@lemmy.world 52 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I've never heard anyone other than OP have any privacy concerns over Signal. Their encryption method is rock-solid, and they win the award for best response to a government subpoena

[โ€“] Fleecer74@lemmy.sdf.org 15 points 1 year ago

Signal is trustworthy

[โ€“] ultranaut@lemmy.world 15 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[โ€“] grabyourmotherskeys@lemmy.world 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I have been using bw for years and never occurred to me to click on send. I thought it was for sharing passwords or something.

[โ€“] Trapping5341@lemmy.world 6 points 1 year ago

I mean it can be. You can put anything you want there and send it on it's way

[โ€“] crunchpaste@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I guess you can use wormhole to transport the data to your peer, and if you're extra paranoid encrypt it asymmetrically with something like age.

Then again you can just encrypt it with age and send it over Signal. There should be no risk involved in sharing public keys even if you don't trust their servers.

[โ€“] EuroNutellaMan@lemmy.world 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Unrelated but how did a ~1 year old post get in my hot frontpage

[โ€“] SeeJayEmm@lemmy.procrastinati.org 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

A Lemmy bug that surfaces old posts on "Hot" coupled with a bunch of recent comments actually making it hot.

[โ€“] Kolanaki@yiffit.net 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

That makes me think it's simply not using the post's timestamp like it is supposed to, so it is working like Active or New Comments.

[โ€“] dessalines@lemmy.ml 6 points 3 years ago
[โ€“] shrugal@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago

Here is a good resource for these kinds of questions: https://www.privacyguides.org/en/tools/

[โ€“] treadful@lemmy.zip 3 points 1 year ago

https://1ty.me would be described as a "self-destruting pastebin." I'd generally be careful about what you can put in there (e.g. put partial information in it with no context) but it seems to do the job.

But the real answer is probably PGP/GPG.

When I need extreme security and privacy, I use qTox

[โ€“] latca@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago

You can both get PGP, exchange public keys and send encrypted text with whatever service you want.

[โ€“] privsecfoss@feddit.dk 2 points 1 year ago

XMPP / Jabber with OMEMO encryption. Lots of free servers and clients.

[โ€“] LazaroFilm@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

The cloud is just someone elseโ€™s computer. If you want real privacy self host it. Raspberry Pi are cheap again.

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