Well, to link with recent news, do you think talking with the late Alexey Navalni over Signal would protect you from russian police? They'd still be able to see that you talked to him.
And then what's the point of the super duper encryption?
And then what's the point of the super duper encryption?
What Russian police would be able to see, that in a given time period of certificate rotation at most X people communicated to Navalny.
You may have confused this information with WhatsApp which indeed keeps a lot of metadata on each user.
They promise to throw this information away, which is nice but not possible to verify.
They also employ a roundabout way of encrypting this data, but as they rightly point out in their article that describes the scheme, encrypting or hashing phone numbers is not safe from a malicious attacker. The space of all possible phone numbers is so small that it could be brute forced in the blink of an eye.
You place all your trust in Signal (and Google/Apple) when you use them. That may be better than the alternatives, but it's still something we should be honest about.
That said, keep in mind that Signal and Google/Apple can also trivially backdoor your software, so unless you take specific precautions against that, the details of their middleman protection isn't terribly important.
To me, it's much worse. A non-profit doesn't have my data but Amazon (and NSA) does. With Amazon's scale, it must be trivial to identify everyone.
See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=autoexec&next=394457...
Signal has no access to metadata, including participants in a conversation. All they know is the date of account creation and the date of the last connection.
However, if they got access to Navalni's phone, then they of course can see everything Navalni can.
Aha :)
Do you people also want the relevant xkcd? The one about the wrench...
Unsure why the downvotes, but I assume it’s from this misunderstanding of the Signal protocol.