9 ms·
Oh, I'm surprised, after a decade stating that phone numbers were great for ID.
by viccuad 5y ago
Oh, I'm surprised, after a decade stating that phone numbers were great for ID.
- killingtime74 5y agoIt shows they have an open mind I guess
- fartcannon 5y agoTo me, it shows that whatever agent is pushing signal adoption has seen the writing on the wall and is trying to get ahead before the tide changes and they have to hit some other developers with wrenches. ;)
- tibyat 5y agowell, the ceo did step down last month..
- tptacek 5y agoThey're great compared to the alternative of simply storing a plaintext register of every pair of communicating parties on the server, which is how other messengers work. What's "good" about phone numbers is that they're tied clientside to a "buddy list" that everyone already keeps --- their contact list. They don't want phone numbers on the merits of phone numbers.
- charcircuit 5y agoI've never used a contact list for my "buddies." We just have each other added on Discord.
- caslon 5y agoDiscord keeps your friend information on their servers. This is, like tptacek said, exactly what Signal is trying to prevent. If servers get seized by the Feds, they don't want to needlessly reveal who's contacting who for everyone. It's about storing as little personal information as they can.
- theamk 5y agoQuestion: do you use Signal? If yes, are you backing up/syncing your contact list? If yes, are you worried about Feds coming for your backup/sync provider?
- stjohnswarts 5y agoIsn't your contact list encrypted? I mean wouldn't they have to hack my password (good luck) to do that?
- crtasm 5y agoWhen you backup to/sync via Apple or Google? No.
- caslon 5y agoIf that happens, that's not a disastrous thing. That means one person reveals who they're talking to in general, not just on Signal. It doesn't mean that the millions of Signal users all lose that privacy. But no, I don't use Signal. I just think it's strange how some people can't seem to wrap their head around any of the rationale for this when it's the most transparent thing in the world. Do I like it? No, but it's ridiculous how some people pretend to be incapable of critical thinking in order to talk about how it's horrible. If something is actually horrible, being deliberately obtuse isn't needed.
- theamk 5y agoI don't think you are getting it -- I am not talking about single user. Whatsapp has 2 billion users, and they are pretty open that they upload entire user's phonebooks to Facebook-owned servers. We know Facebook is not worried much about privacy, so I am pretty sure that this data can be subpoenaed, sold and so on. If you care about privacy, you probably want to install something else, like Signal. But you know what happens if you cannot get all of your friends converted at once, so you keep Whatsapp around? It will keep sending your contact list changes to Facebook, just at it is designed to. Let me repeat this: you worry about metadata, so you want to chat to a friend via Signal. But the moment you add them, this is reported to all other apps including Facebook's Whatsapp. And there is no way to opt out of it. How can people not notice this? How can any company call themselves "privacy friendly" and do this stuff?
- bogota 5y agoI can assure you that most people do use phone contact lists for their intended purpose. I’m not sure what your comment is trying to get at other than being argumentative for whatever reason.
- Talanes 5y agoDo you have data on that, or are you just asserting that your personal experience is more universal than their personal experience? I don't think they're totally off-base: I haven't used my phone contact list for personal contacts for most of the last decade. It's just a collection of work contacts that I don't trust enough to add anywhere I actually talk to people.
- jack_pp 5y agoI'm sorry but do you need data for common sense? Is WhatsApp one of the biggest messaging platforms where people don't talk to their close friends and family? You think discord or other mediums are more popular than iMessage and WhatsApp?
- Talanes 5y agoI mean, I guess I do? I'm legitimately unsure if I'm in some weird bubble where no one uses WhatsApp or you're in a bubble of unusually high usage. But it's been a small enough part of my life that I'm not even fully sure what the connection is. It uses your contact list as well?
- throwawayben 5y agoI assume you're in the US? As I understand it, it's less popular there. I'd say at least 95% of smart phone users in the UK use WhatsApp. I think that's probably true of the rest of Europe as well.
- Vinnl 5y agoSupposedly two billion users as of Feb 2020: https://web.archive.org/web/20200212142339/https://blog.whatsapp.com/10000666/Two-Billion-Users--Connecting-the-World-Privately https://web.archive.org/web/20200212142339/https://blog.what...
- mikepurvis 5y agoI haven't historically— multiple rounds of old flip phones and early Android devices with zero migration story made me wary of overly investing in anything on-device. However, the current wave of phone-number-tied messengers (WhatsApp, Signal) have definitely pushed me in that direction.
- tptacek 5y agoDiscord works by keeping a serverside database of which people are talking to which people, which is, to a serious adversary, the most valuable single piece of information the service can cough up. Discord is much, much more convenient than Signal, and that's good. The services have different goals.
- wolverine876 5y agoHow is Discord more convenient? I don't mean the question critically, but I wonder what a sophisticated user sees in Discord when Signal seems, to me, as convenient as texting and calling.
- scgtrp 5y agoOne big thing Signal is bad at for me is using from a computer. They have a desktop client, but it's just a weird thing that proxies through my phone in a sort of bizarre backwards self-hosting sort of way.
- wolverine876 5y agoExcellent point; agreed.
- haffenloher 5y agoIt does not proxy through your phone. After the initial setup, you can switch off your phone and the desktop client will work just fine.
- Yeroc 5y agoExcept (unless something has changed very recently) you can't backup/restore your chat history to a new desktop client... Security over general usability.
- pseudalopex 5y agoYou can back up. Not restore though. The database key is in the config file. How does it help security?
- theamk 5y agoThis decision seems pretty crazy to me, especially on the cell phones where a lot of apps require phone book access to function, and there is generally no way to give a different view to different apps. I understand that Signal wants to be blame it all on users, but the practical consequence of their design is that the moment people want to talk to a single person on Whatsapp, they give out Signal contact list to Facebook.. and the moment they start using Google's backup, they give out Signal contact list to Google.. and if they ever buy a new phone, they share Signal contact list with whoever wrote migration tool for their data. And there are tons of other random apps which all require contact list access... From the privacy standpoint, Signal having contact list would be better. At least then, I'd have a single party to worry about, instead of dozens.
- tptacek 5y agoSignal having the contact list means that they'd be subject to legal (and extralegal) process to obtain the entire contact list for everybody using the service, which is untenable for them. Again: Signal is not Discord or WhatsApp; these are different services with different primary objectives.
- pydry 5y agoIt could be E2E encrypted.
- gojomo 5y agoBecause the app constantly prompts for contact-list access, Signal's software-on-device definitely has the contact list. And, that software regularly re-sends that encrypted list to Signal's servers' SGX enclaves for their contact-discovery protocol. So whether or not Signal, or some entity near/around it, "has" the contact list is a matter of how much users trust Intel™ SGX® (as well as the chain of processes that deliver/update the Signal software on-device.)
- tptacek 5y agoI haven't kept up with what they're doing so grain of salt on this, but I think this is incorrect. What they're moving towards is a design that looks like what Apple did with their HSM quorum system. The contact information we're talking about is encrypted clientside, but with (usually) a memorable pin. Without countermeasures, memorable PINs are very easy to attack; SGX allows them to artificially limit guesses. As a user, you retain a security dial on this: you can use a more complicated passcode than a 4-digit pin if you don't trust SGX. Obtaining the whole database Signal maintains gives you ciphertext that you need to mount attacks on user-by-user (and to make those attacks, you'd have to break SGX). It doesn't simply give you the plaintext SQL database other messaging systems collect.
- ttybird2 5y agoThis is not the only alternative though.
- pishpash 5y agoThat's doublespeak. They want phone numbers on the merits of phone numbers being how people's private identities have been registered with their contacts. And no, that's not a great alternative, it's a huge negative.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 5y agoThey're also critical to getting people to move from WhatsApp. Next time when Facebook pulls something user-hostile (e.g. monetization with ads, yet another privacy policy change for the worse, ...) some people will simply install Signal. If they use phone numbers as (an) identifier, two people who do this independently can immediately switch to Signal. If A convinces B to switch, and C convinces D to switch, B and D can now talk to each other, reducing the pressure to keep WhatsApp as more and more of your friends are reachable on Signal. Even if you're using WhatsApp in addition to Signal, with phone numbers as identifiers, you're no longer contributing to the network effect that makes it painful for your friends to switch from WhatsApp to Signal. Given that network effect is what makes or breaks messengers, phone numbers as the primary identifier are the only reasonable choice.
- TacticalCoder 5y ago> Next time when Facebook pulls something user-hostile ... In my opinion with or without FB putting anything more hostile people are moving, in drones, to Telegram. I see regular people (non-tecchies at all) in my friends' circle joining Telegram regularly. I'm not saying TG is better than Signal but I think TG's userbase is many orders of magnitude bigger than Signal's.
- panopticon 5y ago> people are moving, in drones, to Telegram As an aside, the idiom is "in droves".
- takeda 5y agoThat's because that's where many of the disinformation facebook groups went to, which is not surprising as Telegram is Russia owned.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 5y agoThese trends tend to be "local" to some extent. Sometimes country based, but I've heard of cities where different schools had different messengers (back in the ICQ/MSN etc. days). In the end, people use what their circle of friends uses. In Switzerland for example Threema is popular. In many countries you still can't really exist without Whatsapp. In China, Wechat. In Taiwan I believe you use Line if you want to have any friends (or reach businesses). In the US, iMessage with a fallback to SMS is popular, while it's rare in Europe because the SMS fallback would bankrupt you due to per-SMS charges.
- thaumasiotes 5y ago> They're great compared to the alternative of simply storing a plaintext register of every pair of communicating parties on the server, which is how other messengers work. > They don't want phone numbers on the merits of phone numbers. I thought they were pretty vocal about wanting to use phone numbers to save people from the pain and despair of having to enter their friends' usernames into Signal, a pure UI concern. The server needs to store each pair of communicating parties if it wants to announce presence information like AIM did. But that's unnecessary for a phone-based messenger - everyone is always "present" at all times.
- wolverine876 5y agoAlso, Signal envisions (or envisioned) contact lists as a foundation for a distributed, secure, private social network, under end-user control. It's an obvious solution once you think about it (a signal of brilliance).
- wolverine876 5y agoFor skeptics, here is Moxie talking about it: https://signal.org/blog/private-contact-discovery/ https://signal.org/blog/private-contact-discovery/ ... Signal began by using the social graph that already lives on everyone’s phones: the address book. Rather than a centralized social graph owned by someone else, the address book is distributed and user-owned. Additionally, having the social graph already on the device means that the Signal service doesn’t need to store a copy of it. Any time someone installs or reinstalls Signal, their social graph is already available locally.
- root_axis 5y agoSignal was built as an alternative to SMS so that design makes sense with that goal in mind.
- phaer 5y agoTextSecure, Signals name before re-branding started out doing only SMS encryption. Sending messages over data started earlier if I remember correctly. I think that must have been almost 10 years ago
- stjohnswarts 5y agoI would much prefer a one time randomly generated GUID myself that can be used to transfer to new phones or just trash if you want a full reset on your signal contacts. Obviously 2FA like TOTP or similar to change it.
- raspyberr 5y agoThey mainly used numbers so they could leverage the social graph of phone contact lists. That way they didn't need to store any social graphs on their systems.