Sometimes you just feel like using Signal instead
Additionally, the signal has had a long history of being feature hostile to strongly secure use, through things like making it very difficult to cryptographically verify the identity of the party you're talking to... or automatically resending the last message you sent when the far end merely claims its key has changed.
I recommend people treat signal as unencrypted communications-- _actually_ unencrypted private communications are too absurdly insecure to use. But in practice signal does not provide the kind of strong security that we would associate with 'encrypted communication', and maybe UI considerations make that an unrealistic goal. Instead signal provides the kind of security we should expect from _ANY_ communication, but which isn't actually provided due to pervasive surveillance.
I have and use Signal with some friends, but there are also loads of people I communicate with who couldn't even tell you what open source software is, let alone articulate a preference for it over good UX.
Are all of your friends software engineers and/or technophiles?
Edit in case of potential ambiguity: s/a couple of/2
When all your friends are already using Facebook and you start telling them to use Signal instead... well, I can tell you from experience that it's almost impossible to break the status quo.
What has happened to me is that usually there's 1-2 persons from each friend group who care enough that they will relay information to you through Signal.
I still don't have a friend group that is 100% Signal. For that to happen, more than 50% of the group would need to care enough about privacy to completely abandon other communication channels and accept the cost of switching platforms. The rest would probably follow. In reality, I don't have a single non-tech friend who would give a fuck about encryption. You tell them about Signal and they go "cool", that's it.
Plenty of us still prefer using command-line to this very day. Most of my work is still done on DOS 6.22.
Most new social platforms that make it big don't really take over older ones, they just grab a younger generation - usually just by being the network their parents aren't in.
Signal's lack of a web interface is another reason.
Moreover, Telegram took the users that left WhatsApp for more secure alternatives (even though Telegrams homemade encryption doesn't look promising).
Same reasons why a lot of people don't leave Facebook.
It's network effects
In my own anecdotal experience Signal ranks way below Viber (popular with migrants + expats), Wickr (popular with people doing illegal things and corporate executive scheming), Telegram (popular in crypto, scammers and terrorists)
The only real broad use of Signal i've seen is amongst journalists - and even there i'm not certain how much they actually use it or if it's just the "i'm crypto aware" version of a blue checkmark for their Twitter profiles
A lot of Signal is basically "trust Moxie".
Let me come out and defend Signal (I usually defend Telegram, but I don't think we should be unfair to anyone):
As far as I am aware no one who knows what they are talking about has come out with anything that says Signals end-to-end encryption is broken.
If I have understood it correctly an as long as that is true, NSA, FSB and the Chinese might be running the message handling together and there's still no reason to be worried that your messages will be intercepted in transit.
Disclaimer:
- as far as I am aware Signal is the safest messenger available for everyone
- even if all the above is true you are still trusting them with your metadata. I think they are good people. If you are scared of them, be aware that they know who you talk to and when. This is however true for any mainstream technology as far as I am aware.
- being good at crypto doesn't make them immune to bugs. There was a nasty vulnerability a few months ago that was remotely exploitable. Again, this is the same, or even worse for every other messenger.
It's too bad bitmessage can't scale :/
You have to check xmpp with omemo, it has libre servers and in federated
So you can't just generate an MD5 of your APK and match it against the store description like the good old days when you could make sure your Linux ISO was legit, but there's probably some way to make it work?
EDIT: It might be possible to circumvent Google's bundling/optimizing by just uploading a regular old APK, but IIRC that was becoming more difficult these days. Unfortunately I'm not an Android dev expert.
https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/blob/master/Repr...
In the modern world we basically outsource everything, including trust and verification. An open, social process of verification can be better, though.
Plus, why would you hire a team of people to kidnap a citizen and beat them when you can assign a ticket to a government blackhat at the NSA who will run the commands against your devices and take what they need without you ever knowing.
Even then, there is substantial risk of whistleblowing for illegal data collection against citizens (Snowden et al) so they would instead in a clandestine manner ask a fellow member of the Five Eyes to perform the surveillance "legally".
Our society has known about Five Eye roundabout spy agreements for a long time and has largely shrugged, so the risk of public political blowback doing this would be minimal.
However, if we're playing poker and I learn your tell, it's in my best interest that you are naive to that fact. While not the best analogy, I would think that the same concept would apply to state actors.
Some despotic regimes do have large kidnap-and-murder programs (ex Rwanda) but if you just want to keep tabs on exiled dissidents and learn exactly who they're talking with back home, NSO Group has a product for you.
I don't really worry about the spy agencies themselves -- I am not of any interest to them.
However, I worry a lot about the likes of NSO and the tools they produce. They are likely to end up being used, in one form or another, by criminals and corporations.
Sanctions on selling exploits seems easier to achieve though since there is less of a conflict with economic interests
Indeed. I think I covered that in "criminal" category, but perhaps I should have been more explicit.
For me, I look at encryption as a mitigation for surveillance. Anything that increases the marginal cost to monitor an individual makes broad surveillance less economic.
Signal will always have the edge for surveillance due to the relative difficulty of hiding a back door. Whatsapp will always be suspect in that they could easily be forwarding everyone’s messages to third parties.