45
votes
How Signal walks the line between anarchism and pragmatism
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- Authors
- Kai Ye, James Temperton, Matt Burgess, Matt Simon, Matt Kamen, Katherine Alejandra Cross, Roger McNamee, Wired Opinion, Kelly Pendergrast, KC Cole, Tim Hwang, Aviv Ovadya, Megan Marz
- Published
- Jul 23 2023
- Word count
- 2589 words
You can sing Signal's praises all day long (and I do), but it all comes down to convenience. My friends and family have a mix of iPhones and Androids and I've tried like crazy to get them all to adopt Signal so we all have the same messaging experience. All it takes is that one holdout in a group to say they don't want to change because the default messaging app on their phone is good enough (anecdotally WAY more common with U.S. iPhone users) and then no one uses it. Try to tell them about privacy concerns and it's met with, "yeah I just don't care enough". I've had the same reaction from nearly everyone who uses TikTok on their phone -- they know it's basically Chinese spyware, they just don't care.
I lived in Europe for a few years, so I know WhatsApp is the standard pretty much everywhere outside the U.S., but private/encrypted messaging is not something the general public in America cares about.
Well, I get the iPhone users' resistance to Signal:
Or you could frame it as that even if someone hacks your account, they'll never be able to access your chat history without having access to your physical device.
Huh? This is nonsensical. If your signal account is “hacked” (let’s say your phone number is spoofed and your account is then compromised), the encrypted backups would be fine. The newly logged in device via the jack would only receive new messages.
That's what MimicSquid said.
No because there are no encrypted backups for iOS. MimicSquid's comment is true whether or not encrypted backups exist, but it was framed as a benefit of not having encrypted backups.
Not to mention, iMessage itself is E2EE, so it already has Signal's marquee feature.
But iMessage is not cross-platform, so iOS users should want something that works with everyone.
iMessage isn’t technically E2E encrypted unless you have Advanced Data Protection enabled. It’s close to it, but not actually all the way there.
Arguably not many people care about encrypted messaging over here either. The popularity of WhatsApp is mostly down to it arriving on the scene at a time when relatively steep SMS fees were still common, and then the snowball of the network effect took over. I don't know anybody that would report "encryption" as one of the main reasons they use WhatsApp, it's all going to be group chats, network effect, and easy multimedia messaging.
I still remember the first time I installed WhatsApp and got added to a group chat. It felt like I was living in the future. Infinite messaging for free over data? With multiple friends at once? It was amazing. I, a bit of a privacy/software/open-source fanatic was of course glad to chat on an encrypted platform. But I've chatted to people on loads of unencrypted ones as well, simply because that's where they are.
Yeah I worded that weird in my original comment. I just meant that Europeans are more than willing to use third-party messaging apps because they’re used to it.
It's very different from my experience. While I haven't convinced everyone to join, I've convinced most of my social circle. I do have to occassionally still dip into WhatsApp, but anything that I organise goes on Signal, so people miss out if they're stubborn about it. And on a one to one, I can usually convince people into installating it. It's no big deal, it's just one app. I don't even phrase it as a privacy question beyond a perfunctory explanation, more of a matter of, if you want to get ahold of me, this is the app I regularly check.
You try that, but then you just need one person who uses mainly a tablet - which for some reason Signal refuses to support - or wanting to chat on a Windows desktop exposing them to the weird low-quality client Signal has there instead of just letting it use the web page (which, if we're honest, the client actually just is, but also drags along a Chrome browser because I really like having those on my machine... 😑
The phone experience is good. Not Telegram-levels, but clsoe enough. Outside of the phone, virtually all alternatives beat it. Hell, WhatsApp essentially has a better desktop-experience because you just open it in a browser and it exposes all functionality and renders as you would expect it to.
I feel Signal is close, but it lacks the implementation detail to appear like a professional and most importantly trustworthy application. Because that's a big problem selling it to my family: It looks inherently amateur, and hence like a knockoff or a hoax.
(edit)
And frankly, it's embarassing that for something as simple as chat we're even looking at privately-controlled clients instead of the default messaging standard baked into the protocol being good enough to use. Carriers really hurt this part, if we had RCS years ago when WhatsApp got so big because SMS was and still is so bad, we might be looking at a very different and way more standardized world today.
Archive version:
https://archive.ph/EDHAH
Interestingly, I missed this news. I'm curious if this will change Signal's stance e.g. on alternative clients.
Quite possibly, as I understand it he was a big part of a lot of decisions that are a bit controversial (eg requiring a phone number).
Personally I’m a bit frustrated with how slow it has improved. It’s got loads of funding, but the app is only minimally changed from 2-3 years ago when I installed it. Better group chats, media navigation and search would be nice to be competitive with what’s app. What’s app is a better product atm unfortunately and the reality is I wouldn’t use signal if it wasn’t for its independence away from big tech.
They need to iterate and make their product stand up for itself beyond its core point of being secure and independent. Hopefully this change will allow some of that.
What differences do you see between the two? I use signal primarily and whatsapp only occasionally. In my limited experience they seem nearly identical in most regards, including the ones you mentioned. But I wouldn't mind picking up some whatsapp power user features for the times that I do use it.
I tried to get people in my social circle to use it since Signal was called TextSecure, but after WhatsApp's adoption of what used to be called Axolotl, the Signal protocol, I simply gave up. I could've gotten my immediate circle to use it, at least among ourselves, but the app was simply not working correctly. I do not remember how many times I've gotten messages over on WhatsApp saying that I didn't return calls I did not receive, or how I'd receive messages but not any notifications. It was simply not a good experience.
Maybe they've perfected things now, but I can't say I care, even as a privacy conscious person. (Not that I'm not glad it exists.) There simply isn't enough arguments to be made to people why they should use Signal over WhatsApp anymore. Sure, WhatsApp gobbles up your contact information, your photo library and all the metadata embedded in your photos (even on iOS, which I've recently learned), and likely create a shadow profile of you even if you don't use any of Meta's other properties, but that's such an abstract problem to so many people. It was hard, at least for me, to argue in favor of Signal when WhatsApp conversations were in plaintext, but now that they have end-to-end encryption, the price for adoption is simply not worth it for majority of people.
I'm one of the crazy people who refuses to grant any permissions to WhatsApp. In a lot of cases I would be happy to shrug and use WhatsApp. But the app is designed in such a way that it punishes you severely for every permission that you deny to it (I say punishes because it limits your functionality and degrades your experience beyond the limitations imposed by the missing permission).
Unfortunately in the US iMessage puts you on the back foot when it comes to agreeing on what messaging app to use. iMessage seems to be folks default selection, so being unable to use that followed by arguing against WhatsApp (which is the usual second option for most) doesn't leave much room in people's patience to advocate for Signal or anything else.
If WhatsApp could provide me any semblance of a UX without unnecessary permissions then I would likely stop caring enough to fight folks over it. But I'm reminded exactly how valuable my data is and how bad Meta wants it every time the app blocks me from doing something and instead asks for a permission that it doesn't need in order to do that thing. And that keeps me from throwing my hands up and granting the permission.
I have Signal, Whatsapp, Viber, Telegram, FB Messenger, and iMessage. Telegram is my favorite:
And I'm so glad that many of my friends have adopted it too, so I have social group chats that I've successfully moved onto Telegram from other apps. I think the main selling points for my friends are:
Telegram might not be the place to plan a revolution due to the lack of encryption (and the status of whatever encryption there is)
But it's the best platform for small communities or groups of friends to chat in. Proper admin tools, integrated stickers and gifs for memes etc. It also has a "native" non-browser client for all platforms that Just Works. I think WhatsApp has one too, but for the longest time the web client just forwarded stuff through your phone.
When Discord is too cumbersome (you only need the one channel for example), Telegram is my choice too.
Unfortunately the Granny Squad picked WhatsApp years ago so that's where my family is :D I've tried convincing them to move during all of the WhatsApp outages and other issues, but no-one has budged yet.
On my left monitor, I have the Signal and Telegram clients for Windows running side-by-side, with Unigram for the Telegram one.
The difference in quality between the two is so startling. Unigram is a native Windows app. It runs flawlessly. It opens instantly. Signal is a website rendering in a huge packaged browser app that can't even do cleartype correctly, nevermind zooming.
I would certainly hope people planning a revolution would not rely on chat software to secure their communications.
Encrypt first with an offline tool, then send. Its inconvienient, but that's the nature of security.
Well the capitol wankers just used text messages, didn't they?
IIRC, they were also detected as an immediate threat, and dismissed.
Shows that even bad opsec does not translate to ineffective coup.
I really dislike that Signal removed the ability to check SMS on Android. That was a huge convenience.
I do think it was the right move though. If they are aiming for the mainstream, you will get people that send SMS messages through Signal thinking it was safe because "Signal is safe". Better to avoid it alltogether. If you are looking for an alternative, I now use QKSMS which is also Open Source.