21 votes

Signal technology preview: sealed sender

5 comments

  1. [3]
    obsoletenerd
    Link
    I find it slightly disheartening that Signal.org uses external trackers on their own blog, yet claim to be all about privacy. What's wrong with analysing the local server logs? They give more than...

    I find it slightly disheartening that Signal.org uses external trackers on their own blog, yet claim to be all about privacy. What's wrong with analysing the local server logs? They give more than enough metrics for a blog that doesn't run ads (and therefore shouldn't care about more advanced metrics).

    I do like the sealed sender feature though, and generally like what Signal are doing. I wish they'd stop using a phone number as the primary identifier, otherwise they're easily my favourite of the encrypted messengers right now.

    18 votes
    1. [2]
      jsx
      Link Parent
      Probably because engineering told marketing that it would be too expensive to build something in-house that would crunch the logs and display pretty graphs. Marketing then promptly went to the...

      What's wrong with analysing the local server logs?

      Probably because engineering told marketing that it would be too expensive to build something in-house that would crunch the logs and display pretty graphs. Marketing then promptly went to the CEO, whined about how they can't do their job and engineering is dragging their feet, and got approval for it (to the facepalming of everyone else).

      I know Signal is probably not a large corporation, but politics like this play out at every company size.

      13 votes
      1. obsoletenerd
        Link Parent
        There's no excuses for a company like Signal. Marketing, the CEO, CIO, everyone should know that privacy is the primary focus. They could use https://goaccess.io/ or any number of log analysers to...

        There's no excuses for a company like Signal. Marketing, the CEO, CIO, everyone should know that privacy is the primary focus. They could use https://goaccess.io/ or any number of log analysers to do the same job.

        I come from a corporate IT background, so I'm well aware of the Marketing-vs-IT relationship, but in this case privacy is the entire point of the company, including Marketing.

        5 votes
  2. [2]
    clone1
    Link
    Signal is weird to me. They claim to be all about security and privacy, but you still are obligated to trust that they keep your data safe, when it is a centralized service.

    Signal is weird to me. They claim to be all about security and privacy, but you still are obligated to trust that they keep your data safe, when it is a centralized service.

    5 votes
    1. bme
      Link Parent
      But this is exactly about removing trust in the central service. Currently they can leak metadata about who is talking to who and sealed sender is about trying to stop that. I agree than it would...

      But this is exactly about removing trust in the central service. Currently they can leak metadata about who is talking to who and sealed sender is about trying to stop that.

      I agree than it would be better if it could be federated etc. It's hard for things that federate to get up take though.

      4 votes