I don’t really like Apple, but once in a while they do the right thing. This comes from the App store’s new labels on apps.
Signal just has “Contact info” under the “Data NOT linked to you” category. This is just the phone number + contact discovery.
UPDATE
There’s another post adding telegram here. This is what it looks like:
Signal has mandatory phone numbers linked to you, which is probably the worst thing for privacy. In most countries phone numbers are tied to your identity, and you can easily find someone’s name and current address with a phone number.
Lets assume that signal is correctly e2ee encrypting message data, but their database can’t encrypt the sender and recipient phone numbers. Its hosted in the US in a centralized place, so we can assume the US government has sender and recipient phone numbers, and message timestamps, and from that can easily build a social graph of connections between people.
You and I can’t even use signal, because you’d have to tell me your phone number, which would give me your full name.
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Thanks for this. It’s a great explanation of why I recommend Signal more often than Matrix.
FluffyChat is making great strides in this space for Matrix in terms of UI quality. But agree it has the same problem as many open source projects, UI isn’t a priority and then people wonder why X project doesn’t take off.
I really like fluffychat!
Excellent post, thank you.
Same here. I want Matrix to succeed more but the ease of setup for Signal is really the big deal breaker I imagine, plus not having to host or maintain a Matrix instance if you’re truly concerned about data management.
Honestly Element looks and works so badly it always scares me off. It’s so slow, the formatting is fucked up and the app is very unintuitive.
Only the recipient actually thanks to sealed sender. So if you’re using a VPN, they can’t build your social graph. There are services that also allow you to create a one time phone number, which you can then secure with a removed so that you Signal identifier doesn’t get taken over by someone else. They are working on making it possible to use usernames instead of phone numbers.
And if you’re using Matrix or something like that, you are still trusting the admins of both instances (sender and receiver) with your metadata (and matrix leaks more metadata than Signal). If you’re running your own small instance, they can easily build your social graph just by monitoring the connection to that instance.
Signal also has a much more straightforward UX, making it usable for non tech-savvy people, which is often overlooked by free software advocates.
They have a ton of very good arguments here. You can also find Matrix’s response.
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This is why I favor Matrix, I don’t have to give anybody any info and it would be hard for the government to build a social graph of my contacts if we use VPN’s or Tor to connect.
afaik matrix stores your data, messages (often unencrypted) on the server you signed up on. signal doesn’t store anything
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that’s not actually the case, i read in the signal blog (if i find it i’ll link it) that no metadata travels unencrypted and no metadata is stored on the servers. even in groups, there is no database storing the list of members, as the exchange of keys happens only between devices with zero-knowledge. if all the members of the group reset their phones the group is non-existing anymore as it never was anywhere in the first place.
this is against the social graph discovery: https://signal.org/blog/private-contact-discovery/ we are talking about a gem in the privacy landscape, there is no software dedicated like this to privacy at this time
The signal back end isn’t open source, so the source for that is “trust me bro”. XMPP and matrix back end is fully open source and self-hostable.
They have to store phone numbers, its their primary identifier and routing system.
Its also a single server / cluster all hosted in the US so by definition isn’t secure.
Signal backend is open source.
Edit: you might be thinking of telegram.
this is about metadata: there are no timestamps https://signal.org/blog/looking-back-as-the-world-moves-forward/
more on metadata: https://signal.org/blog/sealed-sender/
That gets linked all the time, even though its just a “proposal”. You don’t know if it works, because the signal back-end is closed source.
this is about the groups: https://signal.org/blog/signal-private-group-system/