On its 10th anniversary, Signal’s president wants to remind you that the world’s most secure communications platform is a nonprofit. It’s free. It doesn’t track you or serve you ads. It pays its engineers very well. And it’s a go-to app for hundreds of millions of people.
This is really interesting. It brings two questions to mind.
Don’t all messaging apps use phone number as a primary metadata value?
Are you suggesting that Signal could either not use this metadata or not collect it and yet they choose to collect it and can therefore lose it to exfiltration or warrant?
Nope, for example Wire is based on Signal protocol and doesn’t harvest phone numbers https://wire.com/en
I’m suggesting that if metadata is being leaked then it has to be assumed that it will be used nefariously at some point
Exact same argument that applies for wanting e2e encrypted messages that aren’t seen by the server also applies to any metadata associated with these messages.
This is really interesting. It brings two questions to mind.
Don’t all messaging apps use phone number as a primary metadata value?
Are you suggesting that Signal could either not use this metadata or not collect it and yet they choose to collect it and can therefore lose it to exfiltration or warrant?
Exact same argument that applies for wanting e2e encrypted messages that aren’t seen by the server also applies to any metadata associated with these messages.