WhatsApp is razend populair. De app is wel van Facebook, niet iedereen vindt dat een prettig idee. Berichten-app Signal is een privacyvriendelijk alternatief. We helpen je de app te gebruiken.
WhatsApp is razend populair. De app is wel van Facebook, niet iedereen vindt dat een prettig idee. Berichten-app Signal is een privacyvriendelijk alternatief. We helpen je de app te gebruiken.
Without delving into too many details, those presumed benefits of Signal matter very little in practice:
Signal, just like WhatsApp, is centralized: as brokers of your messages, they do know your social graph. In the case of Signal, they “pinky swear” not to look at it, but that’s not a technically enforceable guarantee (impossible by design). The same applies to metadata: Signal can absolutely infer from your usage patterns (frequency, time, volume, …) the nature of your social graph, or if you are rather at work or at home, in a romance or not. Signal can absolutely tell where you are based on your IP, or the device you are using. Worse, while they swear not look, not to care and not to log any of that, just by relying on third-party services and running in the cloud, they expose all this metadata to less trustworthy parties who will do the caring and logging as they are mandated by law.
Nothing that can be said (or even proven) today about Signal is evidence that the same will remain true in the future. Signal can figure that it costs a lot to operate and might seek other financing schemes. Or its developers can be compelled by law enforcement to alter the service without public disclosure. It all boils down to “nothing is eternal” and while we can’t tell when the demise of Signal will occur, history proves it’s inevitable, and on this path it might turn as unlikeable as you find WhatsApp to be today.
The only way forward I see is to break away from the centralized model: by design, it can’t guarantee your privacy ; by operating principle, it can’t guarantee its sustainability.
Signal can update the client to reveal your social graph, sure, but right now, Signal technically cannot know your social graph. And there’s two additional layers that make that more likely, which is incentives: being a non-profit, they have no shareholders that would push them to try to look into them, and their primary selling point being privacy, they also have more to lose by doing so. Neither of those apply to WhatsApp. Oh, and a third one: they’d have been in contempt of court, which specifically requested access to such data, and Signal did not provide it because they were not able to.
(I will also say that, in a decentralised communication system, you are reliant on every party you communicate with, and the tools they use, to not expose such data about you either. It’s not a panacea.)
Again, it my not be as big a step forward as you’d like, but it’s utterly ridiculous to claim that this is not a way forward.
And given that it’s not unlikely that larger steps forward may not be possible at all, or would be reliant on us collectively taking smaller steps forward first, I would definitely reconsider putting active effort into discouraging Signal use. Especially if you’re not putting at least a multitude more effort into discouraging use of the incumbents.