Let’s be honest, Signal is not perfect either:
- It requires your phone number
- It has had some suspicious funding sources
(UPD: It was funded by CIA)
(UPD2: Here I will quote www.securemessagingapps.com:
This matters because “money talks”, as the saying goes. If the company or person behind the money is likely to have reason not to protect customers’ privacy, it’s important to know. This could be indicative of the company not doing as they say (Google, Whatsapp, for example) or changing their mind once they’ve onboarded enough customers from whom they can make money.
- It has incidents (at least once) when backend code hasn’t been updated for almost a half year or so
((UPD)Source: https://www.androidpolice.com/2021/04/06/it-looks-like-signal-isnt-as-open-source-as-you-thought-it-was-anymore/#update-2021-04-06-1-39pm-pdt-by-ryne-hager)
(I’m gonna find sources for the last two statements a bit later to not be unsubstantiated)
Done.
Although, we all can agree, that Signal is still better than Telegram, or WhatsApp, or Threema, or whatever.
Still, we probably want to look at the better alternatives, like Simplex or Session.
Session is also sus because you effectively cannot host a node, last I have seen. They claim it is “against a Sybil attack” but all it does is making sure only people wih large disposable funds can have nodes, and the effect might be the exact opposite.
Simplex is more interesting in this regard because while I am concerned with initial centralization (the default servers), they made hosting your own easy. But I personally stick with imperfect yet trusty XMPP.
SimpleX is great. BUT it’s not user friendly. Thus general adoption for the average user will be hard. Don’t get me wrong using the app itself is easy but as soon as someone switches their phone that doesn’t have technical knowledge they will loose their chats because they won’t understand the concept of moving their DB. Since you don’t have an identifier like a phone number with SimpleX those people could even lose contacts as a whole since they generate a new DB, hurting their social connections.
That’s the reason I personally never recommend SimpleX to anyone who doesn’t have the technical knowledge to understand stuff like that.
Telegram requires a phone number too? I mean yeah there’s the option to use that blockchain phone number service, but you can do the same for Signal. 🤷
suspicious funding
Which lines of its libre software source code are malicious?
requires your phone number
It’s centralised
Which lines of its libre software source code are malicious?
It’s not about code, but about funding.
It’s centralised
Yes, and it’s the downside, no matter how you look at it.
So, which malicious lines of libre software source code have been funded? This is how we stop FUD. Don’t let them derail us.
- It requires your phone number
Not anymore, right? Or does it still need your number for signing up?
Signal no longer requires a phone number. You can now create an account. Not sure if that helps your outlook on it, but yeah. It was a fairly recent update that this was rolled out.
Edit: being told we still do need numbers to register. I haven’t gotten a new phone since well before the change was made, so I haven’t actually created an account and gone through the process. It looks like I misinterpreted what was going on when I read the changelog.
Last I have seen, it still requires a number to register - it just doesn’t have to be public.
What gets me the most is the requirement of a smartphone to register. No way I am trusting my non-public chats to a phone, so that means either Waydroid/VM (which creates issues with copypasting) or signal-cli (which is fairly inconvenient).
