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Why you should delete WhatsApp and install Signal
- maqp 1y ago[flagged]
- yieldcrv 1y agoan app per person these days
- jMyles 1y agoIs that so wrong? Signal has some fairly serious deficiencies. That's why, along with it, I have 4 others installed, one of which seems to stand above the rest (and I bet, just reading this, you know which one I mean). Is it so wrong to say so?
- brikym 1y agoHave you heard of BitchAt?
- schlauerfox 1y agoSooo where's the list? I know of Keybase though stagnant after Zoom acquisition. Matrix.org but it requires a trusted server I think? Velidchat is new so I don't really know about it. PGP signed email? Hard to setup and work with.
- maqp 1y ago[flagged]
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- alex1138 1y agoWhatsapp might have encryption but considering the very public fallout from the acquisition (not a mutually respectful handshake) it's both a prime target for antitrust and something people should reconsider using (as in, consider not using)
- brikym 1y agoIn Signal I miss 'send without sound' which Telegram has. Sometimes I want to send something unimportant and not disturb the recipient.
- DigiEggz 1y agoI've tried Signal a few times and I always end up dropping it. It lacks many things from Telegram that I'd rather not live without. There's nothing I message to anyone that I wouldn't say in a public setting, so I don't see a need to forgo good features for privacy.
- tcfhgj 1y agowould you be willing to share a backup of your msgs?
- slaw 1y agoHow much are you going to pay?
- tcfhgj 1y ago1 upvote
- selfhoster11 1y agoWhat kind of statement is that? There's a lot of room between "I would say in public anything I message to my contacts" and "I am willing to dump all my messages and send them to an online rando to do whatever they please". Try engaging in good faith.
- noman-land 1y agoThere is literally no room between "saying something in public" and "saying something to the whole world". Public means on the cover of the NYTimes and on the public record forever.
- Eikon 1y agoI abandoned that idea as soon as they launched their weird crypto-coin stuff. Also, can we backup our messages yet on iOS?
- txr 1y agoYeah, no backup on iOS is such a huge turnoff. What you live in the real world and lost or damaged your phone? All your messages and pictures you not exported one by one are gone, backups in 2025 no way, who has every been using such a thing? Maybe in 2035.
- ValentineC 1y agoI'm another one of those that refuse to use Signal until they implement proper backups. If people insist on me using Signal to communicate with them, these people probably have far-too-inflexible values concerning privacy for me to bother anyway.
- conception 1y agoYou can use imazing to do it and/or scripts if they are synced to macos.
- illiac786 1y agoIm not a huge fan of crypto, but I understand its use. I just don’t use it. It’s completely invisible if you don’t use it.
- RainyDayTmrw 1y agoMost people, by themselves, have very little say in what messaging apps the people that they need to talk to happen to use. They have people that they need to talk to, and they will use the same apps that those people use. Unless they want to be super hard liners about it, and are willing to stop messaging people who won't use their preferred apps. The people on the other side, who almost always care a lot less about the topic, tend to look poorly on this.
- tcfhgj 1y agoshould I or anyone care?
- bigyabai 1y agoDepends who you talk to.
- penguin_booze 1y ago[flagged]
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- OldfieldFund 1y agoIf you care about privacy
- 31337Logic 1y agoThis comment makes no sense since you are a part of the "people" group you just described. It's entirely possible to sway your group of friends from Whatsapp to Signal. I've done it myself. I'm not saying you should. I'm just saying your comment is logically self refuting.
- lnfromx 1y ago„It‘s entirely possible to sway your group of friends from WhatsApp to Signal“ is an assumption, I don‘t think is universally true. Especially since you base it on your own experience. I just recently made the switch but for me it meant cutting some contacts for now. Especially non-tech people put you in a tinfoil-hat category pretty fast so its not an easy problem if you can‘t communicate well enough.
- cs702 1y agoRelevant background on Brian Acton's funding of Signal, after leaving Facebook: "WhatsApp Cofounder Brian Acton Gives The Inside Story On #DeleteFacebook And Why He Left $850 Million Behind" (https://www.forbes.com/sites/parmyolson/2018/09/26/exclusive-whatsapp-cofounder-brian-acton-gives-the-inside-story-on-deletefacebook-and-why-he-left-850-million-behind/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/parmyolson/2018/09/26/exclusive...)
- alex1138 1y ago[flagged]
- h4ck_th3_pl4n3t 1y agoDelete Signal and install Molly instead.
- jMyles 1y agoAt risk of saying something utterly predictable (and thus, unnecessary) - and indeed, a sibling comment has already made such a prediction: * It really seems like matrix is superior in every way to both of these. It is much easier to backup, restore, and change devices (one of the chief complaints about both Signal and WhatsApp of course), has more cognizable (and yet less intrusive!) information displayed about the cryptological situation for any given chat, and is much more flexible. Also, it has clients which are just as stable (at least that's my experience with Element on both linux and android). My only complaint about the current generation of Element clients is that there is, unless I'm missing something, no way to globally search across all saved chats. Which is really a blocker sometimes when using it for work. But yeah, at the risk of sounding like I'm blinding emitting the cliche response of "why no my favorite app?!", I really think it's time to ask why we're always using and recommending signal rather than matrix.
- tcfhgj 1y ago> hat I wouldn't say in a public setting, so I don't see a need to forgo good features for privacy. People are already too deeply invested in convincing people to use Signal and they can't easily amend this choice because Signal is not a Matrix client -> sunk cost fallacy
- Kwpolska 1y ago> However, given that you can report messages to Meta for violating the terms of use, they clearly do have mechanisms to read messages. That’s not a reasonable assumption IMO. The report API most likely takes the message your phone has decrypted (so that you can read it) and sends it over to Meta. This doesn’t break end-to-end encryption. Neither does me copying the message from a friend and posting it on Twitter.
- tcfhgj 1y agoThe point of e2ee is already lost anyways. What does E2EE potentially give you? A promise, which does not involve trusting the service provider, that messages can only read by the recipient. What does making the app closed source take from you? The freedom of requiring trusting the service provider = facebook
- Kwpolska 1y agoHow do you prove that the Signal app you download from the Play Store is compiled from the source code on GitHub?
- tcfhgj 1y agoidk, diff the binaries?
- maqp 1y agopull the apk from your phone with apktool. Compile Signal reproducibly with their instructions. Use the diff.py tool they provide and check for the message that confirms the APKs match.
- selfhoster11 1y agoIf I care about binary integrity, I wouldn't involve an app store. https://signal.org/android/apk/ https://signal.org/android/apk/ is a perfectly cromulent way to get your hands on the APK file directly from the source.
- tcfhgj 1y agoWhy the world isn't already using Signal is why Signal is the wrong tool to switch to. The world will neither like the same messenger nor will it make the switch at the same time. So you need to give people the choice to choose an app they like without needing to convince their social network to do the same (potentially x-times, because you are not their only contact). This is why you should switch to a messaging standard such as Matrix, not a centralized messenger.
- poisonborz 1y agoOr just have governments enforce iteroperability which the EU is doing. This will invalidate e2ee to those parties initially but makes the eventual switch 100% easier.
- tcfhgj 1y agoI wish it would help, but ATM there isn't a single chat system I know which uses the EU legislation to connect to WhatsApp.
- poisonborz 1y agoIt is only enforceable since a few months. Group chat comes in 2026 and voice/video in 2028. This is still a developing story. One of the problem is that the developers need to explicitly ask for interop and they are seemingly not doing it.
- illiac786 1y agoJust have multiple apps, that’s it. Then you will have a venn diagramm, people with WhatsApp (a lot), those with signal only (no one almost) and those with both (getting more and more, in my circles). I reach to signal to contact a person and if they don’t have it I’ll consider WhatsApp or RCS or iMessage…
- upofadown 1y ago>Crucially, it's run by a nonprofit organisation... Sure, but for all we know it is a wholly owned subsidiary of the CIA. See Crypto AG[1]. >...if we all start to do this, it will mean more people are on Signal, hopefully gradually making it more attractive to move across! Signal is controlled by a single entity and is not federated. So it is only a matter of time before things fall apart. So it is not a good idea to promote it as some sort of messaging standard. I mean, Signal is OK and is a fine replacement for Whatsapp, but all these rabid expressions of Signal fandom are starting to get annoying. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto_AG https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto_AG
- maqp 1y ago>Sure, but for all we know it is a wholly owned subsidiary of the CIA. See Crypto AG[1]. This is such a sad propaganda tactic. Signal's client is 100% open source. The Android client has reproducible builds. You can verify yourself the cryptographic primitives are used, and function correctly with test vectors. E.g. Here's those for the key exchange X25519 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc7748 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc7748 Here's the test vectors for AES https://csrc.nist.gov/CSRC/media/Projects/Cryptographic-Algorithm-Validation-Program/documents/aes/AESAVS.pdf https://csrc.nist.gov/CSRC/media/Projects/Cryptographic-Algo... >Signal is controlled by a single entity and is not federated. So it is only a matter of time before things fall apart. It's backed by the Signal foundation, donations, and it doesn't suffer from bike shedding bigger federated systems struggle with. Take OpenPGP v5 fingerprints that are still, 15 years after SHA-1 was considered weak, not available in gpg, if at all. Federated systems and standards bodies with disengaged management are easy to subvert from the inside with tactics like these https://www.404media.co/declassified-cia-guide-to-sabotaging-fascism-is-suddenly-viral/ https://www.404media.co/declassified-cia-guide-to-sabotaging... >So it is not a good idea to promote it as some sort of messaging standard. The protocol isn't a standard, but its security properties are the gold standard. That's why it's being used in most networked TCB apps that take their security as serious as they can. You're also not proposing a solution so I take it you're advocating for Matrix.
- upofadown 1y ago
- AtariATMHacker 1y ago[dead]
- YarickR2 1y agoTell that to my gardener I'm communicating with over WhatsApp regarding lawn. Or to general contractors ; we're discussing some remodeling there too. Or to a hair stylist, doing her business (managing appointments, collecting feedback etc) over the same WhatsApp for the last three years. Sometimes I wonder if privacy crowd is living in some kind of an impenetrable bubble, separating them from the real life and real people. Sometimes I'm very much convinced they are .
- noman-land 1y agoHave you tried telling them that you prefer to use Signal for safety reasons or do you just silently go along with the crowd even though their ignorance puts you both at risk?
- daft_pink 1y agoReally needs a chat history function across devices. I just find is unusable without it.
- tenuousemphasis 1y agoFor a while now it has synced your recent history when you link a new device.
- illiac786 1y agoAvailable since a really long time now. Like years.
- waltercool 1y ago[dead]
- BrandoElFollito 1y agoAlso push your parents and friends to self-host their email /s Everyone around me uses Whatsapp. 5% use Signal, 2% Yelegram and I know one gal who uses Viber. I have all of them. Ditch <hugely popular> service is philosophically nice, but like with all of philosophy - pretty much useless in real life.