Hacker News Reader

Comment by uph | Hacker News Reader

They have explained what the permission is needed for http://support.whispersystems.org/hc/en-us/articles/21253585...

They have a privacy policy https://whispersystems.org/signal/privacy/

They have explained their reasoning https://whispersystems.org/blog/contact-discovery/

You have access to the source https://github.com/WhisperSystems

You have proof that they don't store your contacts and can't provide them even after a subpoena https://whispersystems.org/bigbrother/

Again, what exactly are you nervous about? What is gained by removing contact discovery?

View on HN

I'm not the poster who you replied to, but - Just because someone explains their reasoning, doesn't mean you have to agree with them :)

I don't particularly want to send Signal a list of contacts - I'd rather not leak that information about my social graph. I understand how they want to use that information for discovery, so they can know who already uses the app.. But for my needs, this isn't necessary. I'd prefer to manually ask my friends for their username on the service.

If there were additional options, I might choose to use their service. As it is, it doesn't fit my needs, and that's OK.

I'm sure there's plenty of other people who appreciate it.

For those who do not understand the economic incentives associated with social graphs, have a chat with Facebook, LinkedIn and Palantir. Or read about the reasons why mobile platforms were forced to implement access control policy for contacts, after apps began bulk-uploading valuable social graph data.

They (OWS) were recently subpoena'd for someone's data and all they could provide where rough timestamps when that user registered and when they last contacted the servers. Unless you think they're lying in response to a subpoena (which would be very serious from a legal perspective), then they really don't store that data.

Of course it would be nice if we didn't have to trust them that this won't change in the future (whether through a court order or their decision doesn't really matter).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com