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This has been true for many years now. At the time it caused a major uproar among the userbase (myself included) whose concerns were almost entirely ignored. Th

This has been true for many years now. At the time it caused a major uproar among the userbase (myself included) whose concerns were almost entirely ignored. Their misleading communication at the time caused a lot of confusion, but if you didn't know that Signal was collecting this data that should tell you everything you need to know about how trustworthy they are. Here's some reading from the time of the change: https://community.signalusers.org/t/proper-secure-value-security-pins-are-too-easy-to-brute-force-sgx-is-not-reliable-enough/15096 https://community.signalusers.org/t/proper-secure-value-secu... https://community.signalusers.org/t/dont-want-pin-dont-want-anything-stored-in-cloud/14057 https://community.signalusers.org/t/dont-want-pin-dont-want-... https://old.reddit.com/r/signal/comments/htmzrr/psa_disabling_pins_will_now_upload_nothing_to_the/ https://old.reddit.com/r/signal/comments/htmzrr/psa_disablin... https://www.vice.com/en/article/pkyzek/signal-new-pin-feature-worries-cybersecurity-experts https://www.vice.com/en/article/pkyzek/signal-new-pin-featur... Note that the "solution" of disabling pins mentioned at the end of that last article was later shown to not prevent the collection and storage of user data. It was just giving users a false sense of security. To this day there is no way to opt out of the data collection. My personal feeling is that Signal is compromised and the fact that the very first sentence of their privacy policy is a lie and they refuse to update it to detail their new data collection is a big fat dead canary warning people to find a new solution for secured communication. Other very questionable Signal moves that make me wonder if it wasn't an effort to drive people away from the platform as loudly as they were allowed to include the killing off of one of the most popular features (the ability to get both secured messages and insecure SMS/MMS in the same app) and the introduction of weird crypto shit nobody was asking for.

tamimio 3y ago
I never used signal or wandered in their communities, but wow, thanks for sharing that!
- autoexec 3y ago
  I was a user and a fan. Spent years recommending Signal to others. People are pretty used to software turning to shit but it still sucks to have to reach out to tell people they should look for alternatives to the software I'd once recommended to them. I swear if VLC ever turns evil I'm giving up on recommending software forever (in the meantime, check out VLC if you haven't already!).
  - tamimio 3y ago
    > I was a user and a fan. Spent years recommending Signal to others. I don’t blame you, I think it did start with a good promise initially, but I believe just like anything centralized that turns big, it will become evil. > in the meantime, check out VLC if you haven't already! The player? Or is that a new messaging app? For messaging I usually use Matrix/simpleX/Session.
    - autoexec 3y ago
      The media player. It's probably the oldest application I use that's gotten nothing but better with time.
growse 3y ago
There's a big difference between "collecting and storing" and "collecting and storing an encrypted version of". If there was such a hoo-hah and it was trivial to patch out, I expect we'd have a thriving patched fork up and running by now.

tamimio 3y ago

I never used signal or wandered in their communities, but wow, thanks for sharing that!

autoexec 3y ago
I was a user and a fan. Spent years recommending Signal to others. People are pretty used to software turning to shit but it still sucks to have to reach out to tell people they should look for alternatives to the software I'd once recommended to them. I swear if VLC ever turns evil I'm giving up on recommending software forever (in the meantime, check out VLC if you haven't already!).
- tamimio 3y ago
  > I was a user and a fan. Spent years recommending Signal to others. I don’t blame you, I think it did start with a good promise initially, but I believe just like anything centralized that turns big, it will become evil. > in the meantime, check out VLC if you haven't already! The player? Or is that a new messaging app? For messaging I usually use Matrix/simpleX/Session.
  - autoexec 3y ago
    The media player. It's probably the oldest application I use that's gotten nothing but better with time.

growse 3y ago

There's a big difference between "collecting and storing" and "collecting and storing an encrypted version of". If there was such a hoo-hah and it was trivial to patch out, I expect we'd have a thriving patched fork up and running by now.