
Signal: The Pros and Cons of a Truly Private Chat App - uptown
https://www.wsj.com/articles/signal-the-pros-and-cons-of-a-truly-private-chat-app-11592127002
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self_awareness
Why Signal is marketed as a "private" application when in order to even
evaluate it, users needs to give away their phone number, which can be
considered as one of the most private things that a person can have?

They even share the phone number with some unspecified thirdparties, according
to the privacy policy:

> Third Parties. We work with third parties to provide some of our Services.
> For example, our Third-Party Providers send a verification code to your
> phone number when you register for our Services.

I would be grateful for explanation.

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Arnt
I think the answer to that question is in the wording of the question itself.
"One of the most private things." Make a list of those most private things and
then evaluate the various messenger apps. Count the number of things on your
list that are sent to each app's servers.

I don't know what's on your list, but I know what's on mine, and no other
messenger apps I've looked at gets below 1 item. What that item is varies.
Which suggests to me that getting below 1 is difficult and that it might even
be impossible.

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self_awareness
I have a private Jabber server (ejabberd) on my own VPS and my friends are
using it to contact me.

And before this, I was using IRC, so the server got my IP address and nothing
more.

My phone number is way more private than my IP address, which is dynamic
anyway.

I see lots of options that doesn't require giving up anything of importance.

~~~
Arnt
That jabber server presents no problems for you since you're the server
operator, but your friends are giving you a complete list of their contacts,
and metadata about their messages too. You take your own privacy seriously and
ignore that of your friends. (Relevant anecdote: I know a case where a such a
server admin discovered that his SO and a friend were messaging from the same
residential IP address before breakfast.)

If you don't give your friends access to your server, this issue is removed,
of course. But then you don't market anything and have raised a giant
usability obstacle to actually using the server for communicating.

~~~
self_awareness
Even if we drop all the facts about technicalities about this server (stored
on an encrypted container, doesn't log, uses ssl, etc), I fail to see how a
telephone number can be compared to a contact list in the privacy scale. The
first one is probably top 3, where the second one could probably be maybe on
10th place (it's probably much higher if the user is doing something illegal
though). You probably might argue that the privacy scale varies for different
people, and of course this is true, but the telephone number is always more
private than the contact list given that it's impossible -- in some countries
-- to buy a SIM card that isn't tied to the citizen ID. So, Signal ties its
accounts to my tax reports in a way. How's that private?

But even if it can be compared in some way, then Signal requires both (phone +
list), when I require just one (list), plus it's possible to set up different
accounts on my server to diffuse the contact list if needed, what isn't
possible on Signal. IP address requirement can't be removed, so I'm skipping
it completely.

Well, unless your comment wasn't about comparing Jabber to Signal, but just to
point out privacy issues on my Jabber server, then OK. I understand and I
agree that I don't follow every privacy standard (I don't have a privacy
policy for example), but since I know exactly what's going on, I'm 100% sure
that even my light take on the privacy protocols, my server is way more
private than Signal ;).

