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230, or not 230? That is the EARN IT question
- seemslegit 7y agoIs signal still demonstrating their commitment to my privacy by notifying everyone with my number in their phone contacts who is also on signal when I join ?
- spacephysics 7y agoThat’s a good question I’d like to know, too. Perhaps they hash the phone numbers then compare to their master list for matches?
- seemslegit 7y agoThat's hardly helpful if I just don't want people who happen to have my number to know I'm using signal.
- doomrobo 7y agoHow would a messaging app work without contact discovery? You try a friend's number, and see if the message goes through? Well if that's what you want, then you can do this for all your phonebook numbers, and all the ones that go through are on Signal, and all the ones that error are not. Oops, you've reinvented contact discovery.
- seemslegit 7y agoA. You can design it in such a way so that sending a message to a non-user is indistinguishable from having a user see it and not reply/acknowledge it. B. You can exchange identifiers with people whom you want to communicate it just like with any other non-phone-based system: "Hey I'm @username on signal", "Cool, I'm @username2" - composes well with method A.
- doomrobo 7y agoSolution A does not compose well with how Signal does encryption. In order to make this indistinguishable, Signal would basically have to man-in-the-middle all non-existent users. And if one of those users signed up for Signal it would have to stop man-in-the-middling them, causing all the people who were talking with their ghost to observe a key change. It's complicated at best, and sketchy at worst. Solution B ties in to a bigger argument I won't address
- seemslegit 7y agoThere would be no key change because there would be no initial key, signal facilitates contacts anyway the only difference is that the sides have no ability to control with whom it takes place. Messages to non-contacts will not be sent because there would be noone in your contacts to send them to, hence indistinguishable.
- doomrobo 7y agoI don't follow. I'm sending (or trying to send) messages to my contacts. If I know their phone number, I'm going to try to initiate a Signal conversation with them. So I ask the Signal server for a signed prekey. Your argument is that Signal should not respond with "I don't know this person" and should instead respond with something indistinguishable from a "real" response. So they must send me something that looks like a signed prekey, right? Well then I would use that in order to do a key exchange and now we're in the situation I described above.
- seemslegit 7y agoSignal server should respond with "I either don't know this person or they have not approved to be contacted by you". You should only get a prekey if they are in fact a signal user and have opted in to be discoverable by everyone or only by select people including you.
- doomrobo 7y ago
- lotyrin 7y agoI guess I just don't value "contact discovery" as a feature? I just don't see it as a casual thing the way the target users of these apps apparently do. I want to explicitly control, per any form of communication, each person who is to be made to know that I operate that form of communication and whether or not that form of communication with me is open to them. I do not want to open up a new app and have a large populated list of past acquaintances appear, I absolutely do not want to appear in such a list, I would rather not use a given app than risk having someone show up messaging me uninvited.
- TheAdamAndChe 7y agoThat's great! Signal may not be for you then, which is okay.
- cortesoft 7y agoor....make this an opt in feature?
- UncleMeat 7y agoIn order to do this, the signal server must maintain a list of who is allowed to talk to who, otherwise the list of people available on signal can be obtained through enumeration. This is a privacy trade off. Some services chose to keep this list. Signal chose to use phone numbers.
- andrewzah 7y ago> How would a messaging app work without contact discovery? "Hey, add me on telegram, my username is @andrewzah". This isn't a hard problem. I don't know why we decided apps hoovering up our contact lists in exchange for convenience was so important. For an app that touts itself as private and secure, I still had to explain to my brother why giving it his contact list wasn't a good idea.
- UncleMeat 7y agoThis is a hard problem. The evidence for this is the decades of failed attempts to get people to use pgp and other systems where I need to have a freaking party in order to figure out who I can message and how before I actually start communicating.
- cortesoft 7y agoAt least that requires the other person to have my contact saved, and actively try to reach me. I don't clear out my contact list frequently, so I don't want old contacts to be PROACTIVELY messaged about me joining Signal... if they are looking for me, fine.
- seemslegit 7y agoHow does it require them to actively try to reach you ?
- cortesoft 7y agoBecause it requires the customer to try to send a message to the contact. They would have to continuously do that if they wanted to be notified when I joined. This is very different than Signal doing it automatically when I join.
- leetcrew 7y agopersonally, I have admitted defeat and accepted that most people will not use my favorite messaging app. so I just default to sms and ask people who I talk to often if they have (or would consider installing) my favorite app. at this point, it's only slightly less convenient to exchange usernames. the contact prepopulation isn't even that useful. telegram in particular seems to drop notifications if you don't exclude it from power management on Android. if you don't know the user has notifications turned on and has jumped through the hoops to make them actually work, you may as well send messages into a black hole. this is part of why I never assume it's a good way to contact someone without explicitly asking.
- stubish 7y agoI'm genuinely interested in the rationale for this. I fully understand it is just creepy, and lots of people want the option for this alone. I'm also wondering if it is to do with notifying people you hope think your number is dead that it is very much alive (people you have ghosted). Any other reasons? Perhaps this should not just be an option, but an opt-in one.
- tlb 7y agoHashing phone numbers isn't useful for privacy. You can test the entire space of 10^10 phone numbers against a list of hashes in hours, and you only have to do that step once.
- ajconway 7y agoThey use Intel SGX to keep themselves from being able to access their users' contact lists. Still, one has to possess and reveal a valid phone number to use the service. This must help to grow the user base.
- seemslegit 7y agoThis misses the point, just because someone sometimes added me to their phone contacts and uses signal does not mean I want them notified when I start using signal too.
- Macha 7y agoThis has been my blocker to using Signal or Telegram also.
- 333c 7y agoWith Telegram at least, you do not have to share your contacts with the app. You can build up a Telegram-specific list of contacts based on who you message on the platform.
- Macha 7y agoThis is the inverse of the issue. I don't want everyone that has my phone number to be able to see/add me on telegram. That would require those users not to upload their contacts, which is out of my control.
- gergles 7y agoEveryone can't. You can adjust the privacy settings such that you have to add someone to your Telegram contacts before they can discover you are on Telegram. It's easily done in Telegram's privacy settings. This is a primary reason I prefer it to signal despite the screeching from armchair crypto experts on HN anytime Telegram is mentioned.
- 7y ago
- tialaramex 7y agoSpecifically they use the first ten bytes of SHA1(phoneNumber) where phone number is like +12345553215 for the US phone number 1-234-555-3215 or say +4424061184 for the number I had as a child in a village in England. This form of number is also the one your (mobile) phone actually uses, although they let you type in any sloppy human attempt at a phone number and translate. Signal apps periodically reach out to Signal's servers to do two things: Confirm that this specific user does still have Signal (and so messages to them should be accepted) and optionally upload a set of these hashes for their contacts to see if any of those have Signal and so messages to those numbers can go securely via Signal instead.
- AndyMcConachie 7y agoWhy is this downvoted?
- eximius 7y agoContact Discovery is not seen as privacy invasive, I guess. It says, X has Signal, but that's it. So I see how it is, strictly speaking, broadcasting 'private' information, but it is hard to care terribly. I'm far more concerned by the privacy of my conversations than the fact I at one point installed signal.
- seemslegit 7y agoSee, there's an apparently archaic concept in software called user preference - they could ask people upon joining if they want to be contact-discoverable or not.
- eximius 7y agoAnd that's fair! It's not perfect. And, ignorantly, I would assume it'd be easy to add, so they probably should. But I can understand why this is a trade-off they'd make in terms of your comfort level (relatively rare to care about this) vs. massive use-ability and onboarding gains.
- seemslegit 7y agoWhat you call "comfort level" is in fact the primary value proposition of a tool like signal and the fact that they have chosen to compromise on it to drive adoption is symptomatic of the many things wrong with the setting in which this decision was made. Not unlike calling out the EARNIT senators on using child abuse justifications in bad faith to promote the agenda of censorship and surveillance.
- ape4 7y agoBut it means they have slurped all your contacts. How are they stored? Who are they shared with? etc
- TechBro8615 7y agoTelegram does the same thing. In fact, so does Instagram, which I find most egregious, since it asks for your number for 2FA purposes then notifies anyone who has your number saved that you’ve joined. Every coach, recruiter, drug dealer or one night stand I’ve had in my life doesn’t need to know when I sign up to Instagram. Some of them might not have even had my real name until they got that notification. IMO this should be illegal, now that I think about it.
- BubRoss 7y agoThat's almost worse than having no volume control in their interface, even for their desktop site.
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- snazz 7y agoI think the issue here is that Instagram has a different idea of the importance of a phone number than you do. They consider a phone number to be more personal information than your full name. Your phone number is also trivially tied to your full name anyway, unless you paid for a burner phone in cash wearing a ski mask.
- Reelin 7y ago> trivially tied to your full name For a government perhaps, but not your average person. This is similar to claiming that my ISP provided IP address is trivially tied to my full name because someone could subpoena it.
- sneak 7y agoThis is false. You are thinking via a carrier; but it turns out that your phone number is mapped to your name and address in hundreds of private databases which are sold to data brokers. Getting name and email and address from phone number is widely available and cheap for anyone.
- pkilgore 7y agoRight! All these babies are clogging up my bathwater drain!
- ocdtrekkie 7y agoEARN IT is pretty disingenuous in how it is designed, of course, but I am all for making it harder and harder to retain Section 230 immunity: It's a mistake that we allow it in the first place. We should indeed continue to erode the eligibility for Section 230 to the point that either the limitations of remaining eligible for immunity makes it easy for competitors to produce better offerings without immunity, or that these companies accept legal responsibility for their actions as a cost to doing business the way they want to. Perhaps this is a vehicle upon which we gradually sunset immunity-reliant platforms. Section 230's supporters constantly push hilariously insane narratives about it's importance, suggesting that without it companies would be inherently violating the law any time one of their users violated the law, or that taking reasonable measures to prevent platform abuse is "impossible" at the scale Big Tech operates at. It's more than past time that we regulate tech companies and hold them responsible for massive abuses permitted by their platforms just as we regulate every other sector of business.
- marcinzm 7y agoRegulation of this sort generally just helps the incumbent players create a better moat around themselves. They can pay for the AI and humans to moderate things while newcomers can't. So it's question of trading of user benefit against giving even more power to Big Tech.
- ocdtrekkie 7y agoThis is the standard scream of incumbent players when they want to discourage regulation. It both ignores the fact that what's "reasonable" for an incumbent monopoly and a small startup are different, and that the law generally accounts for scale.
- saferalt 7y agoDoes it "generally account for scale"? Citation needed. The GDPR has a fine structure of up to 4% of world-wide turnover or €20 million. Whichever is HIGHER. That means for any company doing less than say, €20 million in revenue and found to be non-compliant, GDPR gives the legal authority to fine them out of existence. I only mention GDPR as a specific example because of the familiarity here, but the general pattern of non-scaling regulation that results in regulatory capture and monopolization is the norm, not the exception.
- hawkice 7y agoPlenty of people have complex opinions about 230, but it's a law that says, if you see a comment that defames you, sue the person who made it, it's got nothing to do with e.g. whoever runs the skateboarding forum. Who opposes this? It's just codifying the common sense understanding of the internet.
- core-questions 7y agoOK, so please do tell me how to sue `sk8rboy2020` on the forum then?
- Macha 7y agoHow do you sue the guy that shouted at you as they left the restaurant? Who stuck a defamatory sign on the electric pole? I don't see why the issues these present should move responsibility to the restaurant or electric company, however.
- Hnrobert42 7y agoA better analogy is a community bulletin board, like at a library. Just thinking aloud, what would I expect if my library’s bb was always covered in hate speech? Probably that the librarian would put it behind locked glass and moderate posts. Or take it down altogether. I’d hope for the former.
- nybble41 7y agoIf you put it behind locked glass, people are going to stop posting much of anything on that bulletin board. And dealing with the rest is going to take up too much of the librarian's time, distracting from other duties. It's a reasonable approach for official communications from the library, but not for a community forum.
- GordonS 7y agoI don't think this is a good analogy. Someone shouting at you in a restaurant will be overheard by only a few people, and only in that instant. Someone publishing hurtful lies about you on the internet may be read by many, many people, and will be there on public record for years to come.
- reggieband 7y agoI thought it was interesting when Twitch partners started talking about a Twitch policy that seems to hold the partner responsible for moderating their own chat. That is, if you are a partner and you have community members posting prohibited content into your Twitch chat then you stand to pay the penalty through a ban or losing your partnership. You are forced to moderate your own chat thereby relieving Twitch of having to do so (and presumably giving them some plausible argument that they are enforcing some level of site wide moderation). It was interesting to see the reactions of these streamers since they aren't typical business people or legal experts. There was quite some debate amongst them about the fairness of the streamer being held responsible for random trolls that entered their chats. When I considered the viewpoint of individuals instead of corporations it did expand my view of responsibility/accountability.
- AnthonyMouse 7y agoIndeed. The problem with imposing liability on moderators is that they're already doing about as well as they reasonably can at a job that isn't easy. Nobody wants a platform full of spam and disinformation. But it's inherently a difficult trade off between heavy-handed censorship that catches too many dolphins in the shark net vs. not catching strictly 100% of the bad stuff. If you start imposing liability on the moderators then it forces the trade off into an all or nothing -- either they give up and stop moderating whatsoever or they have to murder all the dolphins because now a single shark sighting puts them out of business and you can't always tell the difference. It also eliminates the possibility for different platforms to experiment with making the trade off in different ways. Maybe The New York Times wants to have an editor read every user comment before posting it but Reddit has a stronger commitment to free speech. Shouldn't we have both and let the different readers make their choices? Isn't that better than locking in the same compromised criteria for everybody?
- admiral33 7y agoI think it's simple. The US postal service uses postal inspectors to try and identify packages containing narcotics[0], and yet we don't make them liable for the packages they miss. Any attempt to moderate undesirable content on a website should not then make you liable for the content you miss. [0]: https://www.uspis.gov/about/what-we-do/ https://www.uspis.gov/about/what-we-do/
- GlTChWhISKY 7y agoWhy is legislation like this being presented.. Its simple.. Less people are looking. Of course this bill is intended to do what we all want. The writing is on the walls. To many people sit around in their passive lifestyle and pass the care to someone else... Doesnt matter who just as long as they dont need to get off the couch and stop scrolling fakebook. This passes... Youll see 1984 realllll soon... I wish more people would start taking shit seriously. The gov. Has been hijacked .. We all screwed.. Period.. Stop kidding yourself.
- godelski 7y agoThe premise of 1984 was that the government COULD watch what you were doing at any given time. In certain respects we're already past that and technologies like Signal are trying to move us out of that Orwellian world.
- aorth 7y agoI used the EFF form linked in the blog post to contact my representatives in California. I will also donate to EFF again. Privacy is important.
- ohazi 7y agoI did the same a few weeks ago. Here's the automated response from Feinstein's office: > Dear [Name]: > Thank you for writing to me to share your concerns about law enforcement access to encrypted communications. I appreciate the time you took to write, and I welcome the opportunity to respond. > I understand you are opposed to the “Eliminating Abusive and Rampant Neglect of Interactive Technologies (EARN IT) Act of 2020” (S. 3398), which I introduced with Senators Lindsey Graham (R-SC), Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), and Josh Hawley (R-MO) on March 5, 2020. You may be interested to know that the Senate Judiciary Committee—of which I am Ranking Member—held a hearing on the “EARN IT Act” on March 11, 2020. If you would like to watch the full hearing or read the testimonies given by the hearing witnesses, I encourage you to visit the following website: https://sen.gov/53RV https://sen.gov/53RV. > The “EARN IT Act” would establish a National Commission on Online Sexual Exploitation Prevention to recommend best practices for companies to identify and report child sexual abuse material. Companies that implement these, or substantially similar, best practices would not be liable for any child sexual abuse materials that may still be found on their platforms. Companies that fail to meet these requirements, or fail to take other reasonable measures, would lose their liability protection. > Child abuse is one of the most heinous crimes, which is why I was deeply disturbed by recent reporting by The New York Times about the nearly 70 million online photos and videos of child sexual abuse that were reported by technology companies last year. It is a federal crime to possesses, distribute, or produce pictures of sexually explicit conduct with minors, and technology companies are required to report and remove these images on their platforms. Media reports, however, make it clear that current federal enforcement measures are insufficient and that we must do more to protect children from sexual exploitation. > Please know that I believe we must strike an appropriate balance between personal privacy and public safety. It is helpful for me to hear your perspective on this issue, and I will be mindful of your opposition to the “EARN IT Act” as the Senate continues to debate proposals to address child sexual exploitation. > Once again, thank you for writing. Should you have any other questions or comments, please call my Washington, D.C. office at (202) 224-3841 or visit my website at feinstein.senate.gov. You can also follow me online at YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, and you can sign up for my email newsletter at feinstein.senate.gov/newsletter. > Best regards. > Sincerely yours, > Dianne Feinstein > United States Senator I don't know why I still bother.
- alec_kendall 7y ago> At a high level, what the bill proposes is a system where companies have to earn Section 230 protection by following a set of designed-by-committee “best practices” that are extraordinarily unlikely to allow end-to-end encryption. As diligently stated by Signal, EARN IT makes end-to-end encryption difficult, but not impossible. All relevant companies would like to prevent having to transition their current architecture over to a design that fits the specification laid out by EARN IT. This is quite understandable as this would bring with it a heavy cost, but if push comes to shove, that’s what they’re going to have to do. I expect that we’ll be hearing a lot more about this issue over the coming months. If this bill is passed, it will quickly be challenged in the Supreme Court.
- yuliyp 7y agoSo the "best practices" under EARN IT are to be made by a committee of law enforcement agencies, with no congressional oversight.
- alec_kendall 7y agoWhat's your point?
- yuliyp 7y agoSorry, I could have stated this clearer. The point is that it basically gives law enforcement an extremely broad hammer for forcing service providers to design their systems however they want to help law enforcement, over their users. It would in practice make end-to-end encryption impossible to implement, not just difficult.
- alec_kendall 7y agoI see what you mean. That made me wonder what type of approach they would take for something that can vary so much and here’s what I found: “EARN IT works by revoking a type of liability called Section 230 that makes it possible for providers to operate on the Internet, by preventing the provider for being held responsible for what their customers do on a platform like Facebook. The new bill would make it financially impossible for providers like WhatsApp and Apple to operate services unless they conduct “best practices” for scanning their systems for CSAM. Since there are no “best practices” in existence, and the techniques for doing this while preserving privacy are completely unknown, the bill creates a government-appointed committee that will tell technology providers what technology they have to use. The specific nature of the committee is byzantine and described within the bill itself. Needless to say, the makeup of the committee, which can include as few as zero data security experts, ensures that end-to-end encryption will almost certainly not be considered a best practice.” It seems that it would be in the best financial interests of large tech companies to try and revoke the bill if it’s passed. This is why I believe it will quickly be brought to the Supreme Court. [0] https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2020/03/06/earn-it-is-an-attack-on-encryption/ https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2020/03/06/earn-it-...
- Whatitat90 7y agoThis only illustrates the point that centralizing server infrastructure and operations in one jurisdiction can quickly backfire.
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