
WhatsApp puts advertisers first, users second – time to switch to Signal - solarengineer
https://hackforprivacy.org/post/whatsapp.html
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pitaj
With Signal, there is no way to see who has received or read messages, which
is especially annoying considering that they have a "mark as read" button on
the notification (at least on Android).

This is terrible for group chats, because you can never tell where people are
in the conversation.

Allo, Hangouts, FBM, and WhatsApp have this feature, why not Signal?

Well, the developers say it would lead to reduced overall privacy. But that's
only if you make it apply to every chat by default, when they could fairly
easily just make it so the user can specify if they want "read" status sent
per chat.

This is restricting Signal from being used at least by my group of friends,
when we are all very privacy minded. We want to use Signal, but features that
are just lacking like the inability to have "read" status in groups is holding
it back.

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chowraid
This are some news I am not happy to hear since I am a really heavy user of
WhatsApp. I gues is time to move over to Telegram or I could give Signal
Private Messenger a try.

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offa
I use Telegram out of convenience (love their desktop client), but it's
definitely not the most secure messenger out there.

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NameNickHN
The question is not which messenger is better but how to get users to move
away from What's app.

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lazybreather
Tried installing Signal. It was asking for a bazillion permissions. I can use
xprivacy and evade those but I dont understand why such a privacy concerned
service needs so many permissions from users.

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K0nserv
I've tried to switch to signal, but the lack of a desktop app when using iOS
is a major problem for me. I'm probably in the minority with this concern.

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offa
Telegram is great for that... but I think their desktop client still doesn't
support Secret Chats, which are kind of important if you want encryption.

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K0nserv
Telegram has gotten a lot of criticism for their crypto though? Kinda on the
fence about using it

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offa
That's what I'm saying, it's by far not the most secure, and if you don't use
Secret Chats it's even more so. Convenient, though, and not owned by Facebook.
I'm on the fence about it myself, but it's my go-to alternative to Facebook
Messenger and WhatsApp, not necessarily to Signal.

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eonw
anyone with half a brain should have seen this coming.

~~~
chowraid
True. they have to monetize their acquisition somehow. I could now see many
angry people getting a bunch of unwanted calls. This should be fun to see
unravel.

