I think Telegram is very wide-spread for running large group chats and communities, a use case that Signal is not interested in. Personally, I want my chats end to end encrypted and I'm grateful to Signal for pioneering this and inspiring Whatsapp, facebook messenger and others to adopt the same.
You will still need a phone number to sign up for Signal. Signal still knows your phone number, you just hide it from your contacts. To me this only makes it even more suspicious.
And you can correlate username to phone number not that hard in most standard setting cases.
Sorry, but that's not privacy. I don't care what they do to encrypt your messages, they are still tied to me, which makes the super duper encryption pointless.
Yes oranges umm phone numbers is a problem. They have that both. Only one can additionally read the contents.
Thats for now the price for a normie interface.
First goalposts first.
But in this thread, GP was just talking about metadata. The goalpost here is metadata. GP particularly mentioned that Signal "fixed" the phone number issue and I just want to note that currently Signal isn't any better than Telegram in this aspect.
And then you moved orange back.
This is incorrect. Telegram has E2EE.
So, not on by default (unlike Signal), no group chats (unlike Signal), no support at all in desktop apps (you've guessed it: unlike Signal).
The success of such tactics can more easily be understood by even looking through the many, many comments right in this thread telling us Signal protects metadata because usernames are now a feature - guys, Signal has the metadata as the *services* are what is the topic of discussion here, not other users.
It's not as simple as Signal inspiring Facebook and Whatsapp, the sequence of events happened in reverse order.
Whatsapp started encrypting messages after significant security issues in ~2012
It was purchased by Facebook under initially some administration separation terms in ~2014?
In 2016 it added e2e encryption. If I recall this was controversial because it limits fb ad potential on users.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that the timeline seems to me to still be pointing towards <<e2e came from Whatsapp not FB as an initiative, even if FB owned Whatsapp at the time.>>
Again you're not factually wrong, but I hope my restating of the timeline makes it more clear why i I think your reverse order point doesn't tell the same story.
Wow, really? ICQ had that in 1996 ...