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Comment by baby | Hacker News Reader

I really feel like the best Signal today is Whatsapp. It implements almost the same protocol and is 1) super lean and 2) everyone already has it.

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The reason it's not the "best Signal" is that WhatsApp doesn't have reproducible builds or any guarantees that e2e isn't subverted on the client side or removed entirely. And it's run by a company with incentives that are misaligned to e2e encryption and a history of product updates that don't respect the privacy or preferences of the end user.

Otoh, maybe a small company like signal is easier to completely subvert by Cia, nsa, Mossad than meta is?

Both tor and signal are funded By one or another branch of the American intelligence community. If you want more info i recommend googling "signal radio free Asia" It's original function was to allow CIA agents posing as reporters for the CIA mouthpiece called Radio Free Asia to be able to report their discoveries. I use the app but in many ways we are actually providing cover for the military and state intelligence agencies of the United States government much in the same way as when people use tor which is openly a project of naval intelligence

> If you want more info i recommend googling "signal radio free Asia"

Could you provide a link? All I can find with DDG is a reddit post and irrelevant stuff and I don't feel like using Google.

> tor which is openly a project of naval intelligence

Again, do you have a source?

That's the first time I encounter these claims.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tor_(network) in the first paragraph of History.

Oh, indeed. But funded by and subverted by isn't the same thing.

It is not the same. WhatsApp (and Meta) collects all the metadata, which might be worse than the message contents itself. It is just their marketing, it is not very private after all.

WhatsApp is completely unusable unless you grant it access to your contacts though. That's my biggest issue with it -- I don't want to hand over my data to FaceBook.

Yeah and it also has the added trust of Facebook, the best privacy respecting corporation at the moment.

Not to mention that WhatsApp, even after having so many vulnerabilities and backdoors, is very functional.

They obfuscate the code but it's clearly to stop hackers from hacking WhatsApp users.

whatsapp claims to be secure… nobody knows.

It's not like that with signal.

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