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The winning in this case was they had to fight to be allowed to release what they provided. As nice as it would be to not have to provide that information, Sig

• seventyone 2y ago
  So they lost and have to give up the information/metadata they have. It's just good news that it wasn't much. But that's not guaranteed to always be the case.
  • _djo_ 2y ago
    No, you're misunderstanding the situation. Companies can't legally refuse to provide information in the jurisdiction they're in some cases, especially when there's a court order. Every company is subject to someone's jurisdiction. Signal prepared ahead for that eventuality and designed it so that their services received stored only the absolute bare minimum of information, and that most importantly didn't preserve the metadata of chats and calls. This is unlike Meta, for instance, which does keep that data for WhatsApp even though the chats themselves are encrypted. That means that what they provided in that particular subpoena is all they can provide from their server records for any user of Signal, not that it's all that was available in that particular case. It would've been even more anonymous if not for the phone number requirement, but I can understand why they made that trade off and given the lack of metadata it's not that useful to law enforcement/surveillance agencies in any case.