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I'm surprised that none of these comment threads are addressing the scenario posed in TFA: > During an all-hands meeting, an employee asked Marlinspike how th
by tdeck 6y ago
I'm surprised that none of these comment threads are addressing the scenario posed in TFA:
> During an all-hands meeting, an employee asked Marlinspike how the company would respond if a member of the Proud Boys or another extremist organization posted a Signal group chat link publicly in an effort to recruit members and coordinate violence.
Like it or not, something like this will happen eventually and Signal will become aware of it, if only through the press. It only makes sense to have a policy framework to deal with these things rather than flying by the seat of your pants. Perhaps the policy will be "we won't take down group chats without a court order", or perhaps it will be something else. But to just punt until a link to some folks planning a lynch mob arrives in press@signal.org is irresponsible both to the platform and to the society.
- dleslie 6y agoSo don't make the chats public and linkable. Make group chats invite-only.
- robjan 6y agoThere's little they can do since the idea of "group" is stored on the users device. Groups don't exist on Signal servers and they can't see when a message is sent to a group.
- thu2111 6y agoI don't see how the group links feature can work if that's 100% correct. You can't send someone a hyperlink to a phone. Unless these group links are some special protocol that does some sort of P2P link to the creator's phone (which would presumably then have to be on all the time for it to work). More importantly than group links is what happens to Signal when someone realises that they can change people's public keys on a whim. Although the app is supposed to display a notification in that case, they can also change the app on a whim. Fundamentally, I just do not see how Signal's social goals (which are laudable) are compatible with their chosen implementation. Marlinspike's arguments about centralisation vs decentralisation and the moving ecosystem are all valid yet in the end it doesn't matter. He identified a problem and basically ignored the where his chain of logic led, i.e. that he would need to figure out how to keep up with a moving ecosystem in a decentralised way. Otherwise, the end game is easy to anticipate: they bend and start swapping public keys silently, either due to police pressure, or pressure from internal activist employees, or pressure from Google/Apple.