I was worried about sharing broadly and leaking info from 1 contact to another, but it seems like the Signal team did all the right things here.
When you create a story you can make it a group story or not.
If you do not make it a group story, reactions and replies to stories get sent to you over your 1:1 chats and not shared across other recipients of the story.
If you make it a group story, and share it with multiple groups each group receives their own copy of the story and replies and reactions can only be viewed by others in the same group.
After having been burned SO OFTEN by other social platforms embarrassingly notifying others when I did something I thought was a passive post, or leaking information from 1 of my subgroups with another I was very worried that would happen here, but great job signal team!
The only awkward part that I've noticed so far is if I have a contact in 2 groups that I create 2 group stories with, they now have 2 identical stories show up on their story board. It makes sense and I think the UI clearly indicates for which group replies and reactions to each story it would go to which is probably the safest (best?) solution, but I could see that getting a little annoying if I share multiple groups with a frequent story poster.
I'm still of the opinion that encrypted private group chats are an impossible UX problem (1:1 chat is fine). But if I were to trust anyone to find a way to do it properly, it would be Signal.
What makes it impossible? Naively I would think that if you have a secure 1:1 communication protocol, then you can send N*(1:1) secure messages to a group of N people. To solve the "fake group message" problem where an adversarial member of the group sends different messages to different members of the group, or delays the message to some members, the protocol could simply allow for a 2nd level "vouch" message to be sent, such that Alice sends the message to Bob, Alice sends the message to Charlie, Charlie messages Bob a receipt with the receive time and a hash of the chat log, and Bob messages Charlie a receipt with the receive time and a hash of the chat log. If the hashes don't match, or the receive time is unacceptably different, then you highlight the message as suspect.
Sure, it takes N^2+N messages, but that's not exactly a massive overhead for text. Multimedia takes N times as much bandwidth as the 1-server, server-many model for the sender, but otherwise isn't terrible.
https://simplex.chat/ is iterating on this. There’s a lot of pros and cons to any design of private group chats from the perspective of privacy, performance and single points of failure.
Messaging Layer Security (IETF working group) has some interesting solutions to the various associated problems, and it's being developed as an open standard with multiple implementations: https://messaginglayersecurity.rocks/
Any "secure" encrypted messenger that allows more than 1 to 1 connections will always have the potential for the "ghost user" problem.
System level some use additional connections/recipients for spam/moderation and the moment you allow any invisible/visible group users in, there is a massive potential for an exploit.
Additionally you have the potential for forking off messaging to other users at the system level for either oversight or spam/moderation/other. Some of the compromised systems out there use this very well.
A sneaky way some of these "secure" messaging apps are also doing this is ghost participants in the chat that can essentially syphon off the messages even without a compromised client. The ghost participant is always under the guise of moderation or anti-spam or telemetry or some other proprietary shim.
> The code shows that the messages were secretly duplicated and sent to a “ghost” contact that was hidden from the users’ contact lists. [1]
Lots of "secure" messaging apps do this for intel and surveillance and not just the white hats.
Other areas that "secure" messaging apps have holes in is the anti-spam/moderation systems that need to view messages and in the clients themselves who have access to the unencrypted content. This is also taking place in other client apps as well: VPN, password managers, extensions, wallets, even build systems and more. Many like VPNs have logs sent elsewhere but deleted locally -- access to entire machine and all network access. People are way too trusting of "secure" systems/apps that are very common today based on trust.
All of these apps/systems would pass code checks, reviews, security inspections and essentially be encrypted/"secure" though a copy is sent off to another area for review. At runtime the leak is in the direction of the data.
Then you also have governmental oversight that opens up holes that can be exploited.
On Ghost Users and Messaging Backdoors [2]
> to add a “ghost user” (or in some cases, a “ghost device”) to an existing group chat or calling session. In systems where group membership can be modified by the provider infrastructure, this could mostly be done via changes to the server-side components of the provider’s system.
> I say that it could mostly be done server-side, because there’s a wrinkle. Even if you modify the provider infrastructure to add unauthorized users to a conversation, most existing E2E systems do notify users when a new participant (or device) joins a conversation. Generally speaking, having a stranger wander into your conversation is a great way to notify criminals that the game’s afoot or what have you, so you’ll absolutely want to block this warning.
> While the GCHQ proposal doesn’t go into great detail, it seems to follow that any workable proposal will require providers to suppress those warning messages at the target’s device. This means the proposal will also require changes to the client application as well as the server-side infrastructure.
> (Certain apps like Signal are already somewhat hardened against these changes, because group chat setup is handled in an end-to-end encrypted/authenticated fashion by clients. This prevents the server from inserting new users without the collaboration of at least one group participant. At the moment, however, both WhatsApp and iMessage seem vulnerable to GCHQ’s proposed approach.)
It seems to me that, under the hood, stories are implemented as simple messages. To publish a story to 200 friends, you just send 200 photo messages to them. Group stories are a group message (and hence separate per group), which is a very good abstraction.
Of course my first reaction was "I hate this" but then I thought about it and whatever I don't care at all. I downloaded the update and it's a new tab. They don't force it on you at all. They very very clearly state that you can opt-out and how to do it. This was tastefully done, which is fresh air in the world of social media crapware.
A little while back I felt this way about 'stickers'. It seemed like a completely unnecessary feature I've never used and designed to achieve parity.
Last week I spoke to my 20-something sister and learned that it's basically a must-have for her friend group, who sometimes have entire conversations just with stickers shared in her group.
Had no idea, but in hindsight realized I'm no longer tuned in enough to know how people just 10 years younger communicate, let alone from different cultures.
My point is: 100% agree. Glad it's not in my face and not caring is the way to go. Being cynical about these features is probably ignorance
I'm currently 20 and mostly use stickers for “repetitive” messages, like “Good Morning” and the like. Sometimes to convey emotions that are hard to type out at that moment, too.
Creating custom sticker packs is also fun, including memes or cute cats.
But of course I don't speak for everyone my age, and it's different for each culture and personality.
About once a week I accidentally send a sticker in Signal. It feels like it should be impossible, but somehow my subconscious muscle memory uses those positions for something. But I've never met anyone else with this problem and still haven't figured out how or why I'm doing it, so I can't blame them.
I wonder how much companies lose just because people hate being forced into things, and they develop a strong aversion to something they'd actually use otherwise just because its pushed onto them.
What's worse, this even affects the few who try to introduce new things respectfully, because people are so in the "IF SOMEONE OFFERS ME SOMETHING IT'S JUST CRAP I DON'T WANT" mindset that they reject new things outright.
On my phone, that new tab necessitates a tab bar that takes up more than 10% of the screen estate. I immediately disabled stories for that reason alone.
Yeah that was my first reaction as well and I am still not sure how I feel about Signal pursuing this, but I appreciated the opt out option. I also appreciated that they talked about opting out early in the blog post before diving deeper into the mechanics.
Assuming everyone you know isn't already using Signal, I think the most important "feature" for any existing Signal user is getting more users on there.
As far as I can tell, lots of people love stories.
My gut reaction to this was disappointment that Signal is working on yet another not-messaging feature a la their crypto integration... But the longer I think about it, the more positive I feel. I actually enjoyed using stories on other social media platforms before I left them. The idea of something similar, but end-to-end encrypted, is actually exciting!
The more useful signal becomes to the non tech crowd the better for everyone. Options are good and they are largely competing with WhatsApp although they have tiny market penetration right now
I had the same thought process. I still use Instagram, but only post stories. It’s fun and less pressure than posts, and get to share fun and irreverent things with friends.
I wish they would improve the app UI instead of focusing on features like this. Compared to other apps I use regularly, Signal feels kind of clunky -- the share dialog takes forever to load from another app compared to Telegram or Messages. The app feels like it's harassing me every single day to update. On open, the app often takes a few seconds of loading in my chats. Makes me wonder what core userbase Signal thinks cares about Stories more than a functional app. Half the reason I started using Telegram a decade ago was simply because it was faster than most other apps!
From my experiences, Signal has the cleanest, most functional UX and design out of nearly all my apps. I have a mid-range Pixel 4a running CalyxOS and it works without hiccups. Not sure why yours is so slow.
Indeed. A simple example is photo-sharing, a critical function for many people.
Every time you send you have to manually choose if you want higher quality over smaller size. You can't set a default option.
You can crop crop photos, but the crop handles don't work properly and often spring back if you only want to crop in one dimension.
There's an anti-pattern where there's a separate tool selection and tool edit UI on the screen at the same time, so if you are in a hurry and hit 'Save' without hitting 'done' (immediately above it) your changes are discarded.
But if you hit the discard button, you have to confirm it in a modal dialog. It's faster to discard changes by hitting 'save'.
There are pen and highlighter tools so you can draw on an image. but no shape tools, in case you wanted to blank out someone's face.
There's a text tool with some display options. But it's always in the middle of the image. You can move it around, but only after you have typed the text. You can pick color but you can't change the font. It's faster to make a meme online.
You can't use any text effects like italic, bold, or underline either.
Remember how there were going to be blurring tools built in so you could blur faces if you were an activist or journalist? Offered in Beta, never made it to production.
Well, you could just put a sticker over their face, using one of Signal's (extremely cringey) stickers, or by uploading your own. But you can't paste an emoji.
On desktop, you can drag a sticker over the photo with the mouse, and it gets a little '+' in a box to show you're copying the sticker. Then it disappears. Why? Because it was designed for a touch UI and only clicking on a sticker will actually add it.
These are just the problems with image handling/markup. I could make many more lists for other aspects of the app. The markup tools would be kind of superfluous, but it is useful to be able to do thm within the app...only they're implemented in a way that is a source of constant frustration.
If you bring this up with them on Twitter or so people will rush to say 'well Signal is for secure messaging, use an art program if you want fancy image editing lol.' The same people who rush to defend Stories and stickers as 'broadening appeal' while simultaneously saying 'nobody uses SMS anyway' even though SMS is ubiquitous in Signal's home market. It has degenerated into fanboyism at this point.
I love how Signal (and WhatsApp adopting Signal's protocol) made privacy easy for the general public and technically inclined alike. Privacy will never be the default until it's made easy.
I'm guessing some folks won't like use feature because it's too "social media-y" (myself likely included) but as they say in the post:
- You can turn the feature off and you won't see other people's stories
- You can choose the audience and the max you can share it with is with Signal users in your contacts list
Thank you Signal team for giving the general public what they want and making it private.
> I love how Signal (and WhatsApp adopting Signal's protocol) made privacy easy for the general public and technically inclined alike. Privacy will never be the default until it's made easy.
WhatsApp did not really adapt it in privacy mind, to be fair. All metadata is unencrypted.
Meta harvests your contact information, intervals and time when you message specific persons. Often, this information is more interesting than the message content itself.
Pretty sure both work the same way regarding metadata. Think about it: if Signal didn't know that A was messaging B, how would they route that message to B's phone? A has to be able to find B's ip address someway. B can't broadcast its ip address to all the Signal users -- that would be a huge security hole.
It probably works like this:
1) A sends encrypted message + B's phone number to the server
2) server looks up the ip address for B's phone number
3) server routes the message there.
Also, both WhatsApp and Signal hash the contacts data the same way. Signal does seem to go a bit further, however.
And all the rest of the data too, for all intents and purposes.
After all it is Meta that provides the keys, operates the network, and controls the closed source apps. Also, it is precisely Meta's type of behaviour that warrants encrypting personal data in the first place.
I'm pretty technically inclined and I lose my Signal history every time I get a new phone because I just can't remember to transfer it. (I don't use it a ton.) I really wish this was more seamless. (I understand the complexity of the security issues around it.)
This is the boat I'm in. My version of Signal already updated and encouraged me to switch SMS out of the app, which I did. Now I'm sort of split between these two apps; my family is, for the moment, still using Signal for both, but I expect they'll soon enough be forced to use Android Messages, at which point we'll have little reason to continue using Signal.
Once my immediate family is out, I expect it'll be a domino effect with my extended family and friends -- those of us on Signal will have fewer and fewer reasons (ie, individuals in our graph) to use it. As much as I'd like this to not be the case, I think it will be. A smallish percentage of my contact list was on Signal, but every few months, another few people would join. I expect this trend will reverse.
Other than the privacy features, that was my #1 selling point when trying to convince someone to install Signal - that you won't need two apps for your SMS since it will become your default app and the UI is better anyway.
Will be a lot harder to tell people to switch now.
I can accept that it is a real argument, since so many people mention it. But I just don't get it.
People have multiple apps for their social networks, and are completely fine with them. Snapchat, Facebook, TikTok, WhatsApp, Telegram. At the end of the day, I think it's just an excuse. They don't want to install Signal because they follow what others do, and it seems like others are not on Signal.
Instead of saying: "Install Signal, it will be your new SMS app", if you said "What? You don't have Signal? That's the new thing man", I'm sure they would try it. Then realize that they don't have contacts there, and uninstall it (because they reaaaaaallly need to save those 6MB badly on their phone, for some reason).
People don't use what's best, people use what other people use. They don't want to think.
Canadians, people in their 30s and beyond, people who aren't on Facebook, random people not in your friend group, businesses. But most of all, the people who keep complaining about SMS support! What you're saying is a bit nonsensical "if I ignore everyone in this group, the group has no one in it".
I like it! Making it more "mainstream" is the way to go even if purists might say that it's feature bloat for their secure messenger.
It's similar to how it's good if more people use Tor for all kinds of activities as it doesn't immediately label you as suspicious just because you use Tor or Signal.
On this new Google Pixel 7, the app launcher thing is limited to just 4 apps. Now that I can't use Signal for SMS, it has lost it's convenient spot on my home screen. I find myself using it less, so like you, I'm very displeased about their dropping SMS. The forum thread on Signal's Discourse about the change is full of snide remarks from their moderators, and it's extremely disappointing to see Signal community leaders disparaging their own long-time users over SMS. Turning back on the legacy of TextSecure in this way justifies framing this as a betrayal.
All that being said...
I still trust Signal's Stories implementation over any other. While I believe they could have competed with SMS-capable apps like iMessage, Google Messages, and Samsung Messages, if pivoting into WhatsApp/Instagram/Snapchat/TikTok territory is what they'd rather do, then I believe they can execute it well.
I use signal for SMS. Is this an iOS thing? If so presumably it's an Apple restriction?
edit: ah, they announced recently that they are removing SMS support in Android. The reasoning is solid IMO, I've accidentally sent insecure messages before.
Maybe I'm the odd one but I haven't received an SMS in a decade. It's all iMessage, WhatsApp, Telegram and the only SMS are transactional that I receive but never send.
I was only able to convince family to use Signal because they didn't need two apps for messaging. It's pretty much a dead app for me now and the decision makes my conversations profoundly less private and safe.
I know that Signal announced plans to have accounts based on usernames rather than phone numbers in the past. I wonder if the removal of SMS has something to do with usernames.
SMS is very rarely used anymore outside of the US and a few select other countries, and for most people Signal and similar messengers serve as a replacement for text messages, not a supplement. It's probably just not a worthwhile market/feature to keep anymore.
Come to think of it, I'm having a very hard time coming up with any sensible use case for using Signal over text message. Presumably both sides still need Signal for the encryption to work, so what's the point? Might as well use the internet to send the message. The only scenario I can see it being useful is when you have GSM, but no internet connectivity, and that's rare these days.
I'm still extremely disappointed in Signal's choice to drop SMS support, which feels like a key adoption vector to me. However, I'm glad to see that they're still building privacy-first versions of popular social networking features. This does the double-duty of giving privacy conscious folks access to those features and showing that there's no need to invade users' privacy to offer these things - instead when others offer them it is in order to capture more attention and personal information.
My family members will basically all stop using Signal now because they didn't want two apps for messaging. This will make all my conversations less private rather than more. It was a really dumb decision. I was able to convince a lot of people to switch because "it's just text and voice messaging except if we both have the app then it's more secure." I will basically be alone in my usage of Signal after the change goes through and am assuming I'll just uninstall it eventually as well once my family isn't there anymore.
Same. Only now I will be "forced" to ditch Signal as well, for the exact same reason. And I'm an uber-paranoid privacy nut who uses GrapheneOS on my phone.
Thing is, I have all of 2 close contacts who use Signal. The rest use the default messaging app on their phone. So I already had to accept the fact that most of my texts were non-encrypted while I continued to try to persuade people to install Signal. Which was easier to do when it could conveniently replace their default messaging app and give them better security and privacy without any sacrifice.
But like them, I also have zero interest in using Signal to text all of 2 people and a different messaging app for everyone else. As much as I want e2e encryption for my texts, and would like SMS to be universally replaced by something secure, it's not like I text enough (or even use a phone enough) for my texts to be a particularly large attack vector in the first place. It would be way more useful to get MFA codes sent through Signal than it would to have my close contacts switch (and they're not going to anyway so what does it matter if I'm the only one who uses it?)
> My family members will basically all stop using Signal now because they didn't want two apps for messaging.
Schedule time in your calendar for helping family with their "lost" SMS. At least at the moment, Signal seems to keep SMS separately from other apps. Uninstalling Signal will probably make any archived messages dissapear, at least temporarily.
The announcement says “give the people what they want”. You know what I really want in Signal for iOS? Backups, not stories. Congratulations for launching stories, but I honestly don’t understand why it has been prioritized over backups (E2E encrypted of course). That’s a major missing piece to replace WhatsApp and other messaging solutions.
There is so much basic functionality missing in Signal as a chat client, news like this - or e.g. integrating crypto payments with a shady cyrpotcurrency [0] - upset me as it does you.
No backups, no drag-n-drop or even pasting support for many things on Mac and iOS, no list of links in chats, no jumping to the context where a media was sent, such an non-native app feel overall are just top-of-my-head annoyances that make Signal a very mediocre chat experience.
Which is a shame, as I share and support most ideas and ideals of Signal.
But I so rarely see Signal as a chat app improve, it angers me.
I've lost my entire message history 3 times now in the past 6 years because they don't have backups. iOS -> iOS migration is buggy and prematurely wipes the old device every time.
Stopped recommending Signal because of this. Seeing stories, stickers, and crypto payments prioritized over basic data integrity makes me sad.
Readit News
When you create a story you can make it a group story or not.
If you do not make it a group story, reactions and replies to stories get sent to you over your 1:1 chats and not shared across other recipients of the story.
If you make it a group story, and share it with multiple groups each group receives their own copy of the story and replies and reactions can only be viewed by others in the same group.
After having been burned SO OFTEN by other social platforms embarrassingly notifying others when I did something I thought was a passive post, or leaking information from 1 of my subgroups with another I was very worried that would happen here, but great job signal team!
The only awkward part that I've noticed so far is if I have a contact in 2 groups that I create 2 group stories with, they now have 2 identical stories show up on their story board. It makes sense and I think the UI clearly indicates for which group replies and reactions to each story it would go to which is probably the safest (best?) solution, but I could see that getting a little annoying if I share multiple groups with a frequent story poster.
Sure, it takes N^2+N messages, but that's not exactly a massive overhead for text. Multimedia takes N times as much bandwidth as the 1-server, server-many model for the sender, but otherwise isn't terrible.
System level some use additional connections/recipients for spam/moderation and the moment you allow any invisible/visible group users in, there is a massive potential for an exploit.
Additionally you have the potential for forking off messaging to other users at the system level for either oversight or spam/moderation/other. Some of the compromised systems out there use this very well.
A sneaky way some of these "secure" messaging apps are also doing this is ghost participants in the chat that can essentially syphon off the messages even without a compromised client. The ghost participant is always under the guise of moderation or anti-spam or telemetry or some other proprietary shim.
> The code shows that the messages were secretly duplicated and sent to a “ghost” contact that was hidden from the users’ contact lists. [1]
Lots of "secure" messaging apps do this for intel and surveillance and not just the white hats.
Other areas that "secure" messaging apps have holes in is the anti-spam/moderation systems that need to view messages and in the clients themselves who have access to the unencrypted content. This is also taking place in other client apps as well: VPN, password managers, extensions, wallets, even build systems and more. Many like VPNs have logs sent elsewhere but deleted locally -- access to entire machine and all network access. People are way too trusting of "secure" systems/apps that are very common today based on trust.
All of these apps/systems would pass code checks, reviews, security inspections and essentially be encrypted/"secure" though a copy is sent off to another area for review. At runtime the leak is in the direction of the data.
Then you also have governmental oversight that opens up holes that can be exploited.
On Ghost Users and Messaging Backdoors [2]
> to add a “ghost user” (or in some cases, a “ghost device”) to an existing group chat or calling session. In systems where group membership can be modified by the provider infrastructure, this could mostly be done via changes to the server-side components of the provider’s system.
> I say that it could mostly be done server-side, because there’s a wrinkle. Even if you modify the provider infrastructure to add unauthorized users to a conversation, most existing E2E systems do notify users when a new participant (or device) joins a conversation. Generally speaking, having a stranger wander into your conversation is a great way to notify criminals that the game’s afoot or what have you, so you’ll absolutely want to block this warning.
> While the GCHQ proposal doesn’t go into great detail, it seems to follow that any workable proposal will require providers to suppress those warning messages at the target’s device. This means the proposal will also require changes to the client application as well as the server-side infrastructure.
> (Certain apps like Signal are already somewhat hardened against these changes, because group chat setup is handled in an end-to-end encrypted/authenticated fashion by clients. This prevents the server from inserting new users without the collaboration of at least one group participant. At the moment, however, both WhatsApp and iMessage seem vulnerable to GCHQ’s proposed approach.)
[1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/v7veg8/anom-app-source-code-...
[2] https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2018/12/17/on-ghost...
Last week I spoke to my 20-something sister and learned that it's basically a must-have for her friend group, who sometimes have entire conversations just with stickers shared in her group.
Had no idea, but in hindsight realized I'm no longer tuned in enough to know how people just 10 years younger communicate, let alone from different cultures.
My point is: 100% agree. Glad it's not in my face and not caring is the way to go. Being cynical about these features is probably ignorance
Creating custom sticker packs is also fun, including memes or cute cats.
But of course I don't speak for everyone my age, and it's different for each culture and personality.
What's worse, this even affects the few who try to introduce new things respectfully, because people are so in the "IF SOMEONE OFFERS ME SOMETHING IT'S JUST CRAP I DON'T WANT" mindset that they reject new things outright.
As far as I can tell, lots of people love stories.
I love this! I wish WhatsApp had such a toggle, since nobody in my contacts uses the "Status" feature so I just want to hide it somewhere.
I'm not sure if I'll use it much, but giving me a simple setting to decide for myself makes me much more optimistic towards this.
Every time you send you have to manually choose if you want higher quality over smaller size. You can't set a default option.
You can crop crop photos, but the crop handles don't work properly and often spring back if you only want to crop in one dimension.
There's an anti-pattern where there's a separate tool selection and tool edit UI on the screen at the same time, so if you are in a hurry and hit 'Save' without hitting 'done' (immediately above it) your changes are discarded.
But if you hit the discard button, you have to confirm it in a modal dialog. It's faster to discard changes by hitting 'save'.
There are pen and highlighter tools so you can draw on an image. but no shape tools, in case you wanted to blank out someone's face.
There's a text tool with some display options. But it's always in the middle of the image. You can move it around, but only after you have typed the text. You can pick color but you can't change the font. It's faster to make a meme online.
You can't use any text effects like italic, bold, or underline either.
Remember how there were going to be blurring tools built in so you could blur faces if you were an activist or journalist? Offered in Beta, never made it to production.
Well, you could just put a sticker over their face, using one of Signal's (extremely cringey) stickers, or by uploading your own. But you can't paste an emoji.
On desktop, you can drag a sticker over the photo with the mouse, and it gets a little '+' in a box to show you're copying the sticker. Then it disappears. Why? Because it was designed for a touch UI and only clicking on a sticker will actually add it.
These are just the problems with image handling/markup. I could make many more lists for other aspects of the app. The markup tools would be kind of superfluous, but it is useful to be able to do thm within the app...only they're implemented in a way that is a source of constant frustration.
If you bring this up with them on Twitter or so people will rush to say 'well Signal is for secure messaging, use an art program if you want fancy image editing lol.' The same people who rush to defend Stories and stickers as 'broadening appeal' while simultaneously saying 'nobody uses SMS anyway' even though SMS is ubiquitous in Signal's home market. It has degenerated into fanboyism at this point.
Deleted Comment
I'm guessing some folks won't like use feature because it's too "social media-y" (myself likely included) but as they say in the post:
- You can turn the feature off and you won't see other people's stories
- You can choose the audience and the max you can share it with is with Signal users in your contacts list
Thank you Signal team for giving the general public what they want and making it private.
WhatsApp did not really adapt it in privacy mind, to be fair. All metadata is unencrypted.
Meta harvests your contact information, intervals and time when you message specific persons. Often, this information is more interesting than the message content itself.
Pretty sure both work the same way regarding metadata. Think about it: if Signal didn't know that A was messaging B, how would they route that message to B's phone? A has to be able to find B's ip address someway. B can't broadcast its ip address to all the Signal users -- that would be a huge security hole.
It probably works like this: 1) A sends encrypted message + B's phone number to the server 2) server looks up the ip address for B's phone number 3) server routes the message there.
Also, both WhatsApp and Signal hash the contacts data the same way. Signal does seem to go a bit further, however.
WhatsApp's implementation: https://www.whatsapp.com/legal/information-for-people-who-do... Signal's implementation: https://signal.org/blog/private-contact-discovery/
And all the rest of the data too, for all intents and purposes.
After all it is Meta that provides the keys, operates the network, and controls the closed source apps. Also, it is precisely Meta's type of behaviour that warrants encrypting personal data in the first place.
Is there any solid evidence for this or are we just believing what Facebook says?
WhatsApp's APK files have obfuscated code. A few years ago they forgot to obfuscate a file and they got exposed.
Not to mention so many severe vulnerabilities discovered in WhatsApp every now and then.
People who really think WhatsApp's claims about E2EE are true and it's making them safer or private, are trusting Facebook too much.
1) Enable daily backups in Signal
2) Set up Syncthing to automatically send these backups to your laptop/whatever.
3) Profit.
Once my immediate family is out, I expect it'll be a domino effect with my extended family and friends -- those of us on Signal will have fewer and fewer reasons (ie, individuals in our graph) to use it. As much as I'd like this to not be the case, I think it will be. A smallish percentage of my contact list was on Signal, but every few months, another few people would join. I expect this trend will reverse.
Will be a lot harder to tell people to switch now.
People have multiple apps for their social networks, and are completely fine with them. Snapchat, Facebook, TikTok, WhatsApp, Telegram. At the end of the day, I think it's just an excuse. They don't want to install Signal because they follow what others do, and it seems like others are not on Signal.
Instead of saying: "Install Signal, it will be your new SMS app", if you said "What? You don't have Signal? That's the new thing man", I'm sure they would try it. Then realize that they don't have contacts there, and uninstall it (because they reaaaaaallly need to save those 6MB badly on their phone, for some reason).
People don't use what's best, people use what other people use. They don't want to think.
1) Spam (~40%)
2) Transactional messages (~40%)
3) Conversations with old (45+) relatives (~15%)
4) Conversations with people I barely know (parents of kids' friends, people responding to a web market listing, that kind of thing) (~5%)
but you are right it doesn't have much use for children
It's similar to how it's good if more people use Tor for all kinds of activities as it doesn't immediately label you as suspicious just because you use Tor or Signal.
All that being said...
I still trust Signal's Stories implementation over any other. While I believe they could have competed with SMS-capable apps like iMessage, Google Messages, and Samsung Messages, if pivoting into WhatsApp/Instagram/Snapchat/TikTok territory is what they'd rather do, then I believe they can execute it well.
edit: ah, they announced recently that they are removing SMS support in Android. The reasoning is solid IMO, I've accidentally sent insecure messages before.
Come to think of it, I'm having a very hard time coming up with any sensible use case for using Signal over text message. Presumably both sides still need Signal for the encryption to work, so what's the point? Might as well use the internet to send the message. The only scenario I can see it being useful is when you have GSM, but no internet connectivity, and that's rare these days.
Deleted Comment
Thing is, I have all of 2 close contacts who use Signal. The rest use the default messaging app on their phone. So I already had to accept the fact that most of my texts were non-encrypted while I continued to try to persuade people to install Signal. Which was easier to do when it could conveniently replace their default messaging app and give them better security and privacy without any sacrifice.
But like them, I also have zero interest in using Signal to text all of 2 people and a different messaging app for everyone else. As much as I want e2e encryption for my texts, and would like SMS to be universally replaced by something secure, it's not like I text enough (or even use a phone enough) for my texts to be a particularly large attack vector in the first place. It would be way more useful to get MFA codes sent through Signal than it would to have my close contacts switch (and they're not going to anyway so what does it matter if I'm the only one who uses it?)
Schedule time in your calendar for helping family with their "lost" SMS. At least at the moment, Signal seems to keep SMS separately from other apps. Uninstalling Signal will probably make any archived messages dissapear, at least temporarily.
No backups, no drag-n-drop or even pasting support for many things on Mac and iOS, no list of links in chats, no jumping to the context where a media was sent, such an non-native app feel overall are just top-of-my-head annoyances that make Signal a very mediocre chat experience.
Which is a shame, as I share and support most ideas and ideals of Signal. But I so rarely see Signal as a chat app improve, it angers me.
- [0] https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360057625692-In...
Stopped recommending Signal because of this. Seeing stories, stickers, and crypto payments prioritized over basic data integrity makes me sad.