Why you should delete WhatsApp and install Signal

96 pointsposted a day ago
by ColinWright
(andrewsteele.co.uk)

70 Comments

RainyDayTmrw

a day ago

Most people, by themselves, have very little say in what messaging apps the people that they need to talk to happen to use. They have people that they need to talk to, and they will use the same apps that those people use. Unless they want to be super hard liners about it, and are willing to stop messaging people who won't use their preferred apps. The people on the other side, who almost always care a lot less about the topic, tend to look poorly on this.

illiac786

13 hours ago

I think you are making the assumption people cannot use two apps. I don’t know a single person using Sognal that doesn’t also use WhatsApp. If they use signal, I will communicate with them on signal. That’s how the situation evolve. Install signal, have people contacting you on signal.

31337Logic

a day ago

This comment makes no sense since you are a part of the "people" group you just described.

It's entirely possible to sway your group of friends from Whatsapp to Signal. I've done it myself. I'm not saying you should. I'm just saying your comment is logically self refuting.

lnfromx

a day ago

„It‘s entirely possible to sway your group of friends from WhatsApp to Signal“ is an assumption, I don‘t think is universally true. Especially since you base it on your own experience. I just recently made the switch but for me it meant cutting some contacts for now. Especially non-tech people put you in a tinfoil-hat category pretty fast so its not an easy problem if you can‘t communicate well enough.

abenga

20 hours ago

This assumes you have one isolated group of friends who communicate mostly with each other and not as much to people outside this group. You would need to convince your friends+family to switch, then they in turn need to convince their other friends+family to switch, and so on. What your friends did is install Signal to communicate with you.

Kwpolska

a day ago

> However, given that you can report messages to Meta for violating the terms of use, they clearly do have mechanisms to read messages.

That’s not a reasonable assumption IMO. The report API most likely takes the message your phone has decrypted (so that you can read it) and sends it over to Meta. This doesn’t break end-to-end encryption. Neither does me copying the message from a friend and posting it on Twitter.

tcfhgj

a day ago

The point of e2ee is already lost anyways.

What does E2EE potentially give you? A promise, which does not involve trusting the service provider, that messages can only read by the recipient.

What does making the app closed source take from you? The freedom of requiring trusting the service provider = facebook

maqp

a day ago

"What does making the app closed source take from you? The freedom of requiring trusting the service provider = facebook"

It does change the requirement of collection.

It's no longer "Well all this data is rolling in, what shall we do with it".

It's "Hey, if we commit THREE BILLION FELONIES of backdooring our every users' encryption, we can access all that data".

Surely you realize that's a leap.

Kwpolska

a day ago

How do you prove that the Signal app you download from the Play Store is compiled from the source code on GitHub?

maqp

a day ago

pull the apk from your phone with apktool. Compile Signal reproducibly with their instructions. Use the diff.py tool they provide and check for the message that confirms the APKs match.

31337Logic

a day ago

Compile it yourself and compare the hash.

tcfhgj

a day ago

idk, diff the binaries?

tcfhgj

a day ago

Why the world isn't already using Signal is why Signal is the wrong tool to switch to.

The world will neither like the same messenger nor will it make the switch at the same time.

So you need to give people the choice to choose an app they like without needing to convince their social network to do the same (potentially x-times, because you are not their only contact).

This is why you should switch to a messaging standard such as Matrix, not a centralized messenger.

illiac786

13 hours ago

Just have multiple apps, that’s it.

Then you will have a venn diagramm, people with WhatsApp (a lot), those with signal only (no one almost) and those with both (getting more and more, in my circles).

I reach to signal to contact a person and if they don’t have it I’ll consider WhatsApp or RCS or iMessage…

poisonborz

a day ago

Or just have governments enforce iteroperability which the EU is doing. This will invalidate e2ee to those parties initially but makes the eventual switch 100% easier.

tcfhgj

21 hours ago

I wish it would help, but ATM there isn't a single chat system I know which uses the EU legislation to connect to WhatsApp.

poisonborz

11 hours ago

It is only enforceable since a few months. Group chat comes in 2026 and voice/video in 2028. This is still a developing story. One of the problem is that the developers need to explicitly ask for interop and they are seemingly not doing it.

brikym

a day ago

In Signal I miss 'send without sound' which Telegram has. Sometimes I want to send something unimportant and not disturb the recipient.

DigiEggz

a day ago

I've tried Signal a few times and I always end up dropping it. It lacks many things from Telegram that I'd rather not live without. There's nothing I message to anyone that I wouldn't say in a public setting, so I don't see a need to forgo good features for privacy.

surrealistic

a day ago

This "nothing to hide" is such a naïve take.

Did the assassinated politicians in Minnesota have anything to hide? Because their data was purchased from data brokers for the hit.

tcfhgj

a day ago

would you be willing to share a backup of your msgs?

selfhoster11

a day ago

What kind of statement is that? There's a lot of room between "I would say in public anything I message to my contacts" and "I am willing to dump all my messages and send them to an online rando to do whatever they please". Try engaging in good faith.

surrealistic

a day ago

The kind of statement that shows how much of an empty braggadocio it is to say "I don't need privacy because I have nothing to hide".

noman-land

a day ago

There is literally no room between "saying something in public" and "saying something to the whole world". Public means on the cover of the NYTimes and on the public record forever.

mog_dev

a day ago

So do I understand you do not want these conversations to be read by anyone except you and the recipient? If you don't mind please send the link to a backup of your message I promise I would not read them but I want to make sure you have nothing to hide. Just in case.

selfhoster11

19 hours ago

No, public literally just means "in a place that isn't private". It doesn't mean that the utterance will be recorded forever verbatim, or that the scope of the non-private place is "the entire world". New York Times may be public, but so is a cafe in a shopping mall. You cannot claim that the two are one or the same, because they are quite obviously markedly different despite fitting the category.

illiac786

12 hours ago

But then, he doesn’t want the content to be recorded, ergo he should use signal. No?

slaw

a day ago

How much are you going to pay?

maqp

a day ago

It's the responsibility of the recipient to mute their phone when it's unpleasant/awkward for them to have their phone make noises.

daft_pink

a day ago

Really needs a chat history function across devices. I just find is unusable without it.

illiac786

12 hours ago

Available since a really long time now. Like years.

tenuousemphasis

a day ago

For a while now it has synced your recent history when you link a new device.

alex1138

a day ago

Whatsapp might have encryption but considering the very public fallout from the acquisition (not a mutually respectful handshake) it's both a prime target for antitrust and something people should reconsider using (as in, consider not using)

josh2600

a day ago

Encryption absent open source is dubious at best.

tcfhgj

a day ago

end-to-end encryption, specifically

Eikon

a day ago

I abandoned that idea as soon as they launched their weird crypto-coin stuff.

Also, can we backup our messages yet on iOS?

illiac786

12 hours ago

Im not a huge fan of crypto, but I understand its use. I just don’t use it. It’s completely invisible if you don’t use it.

txr

a day ago

Yeah, no backup on iOS is such a huge turnoff. What you live in the real world and lost or damaged your phone? All your messages and pictures you not exported one by one are gone, backups in 2025 no way, who has every been using such a thing? Maybe in 2035.

ValentineC

a day ago

I'm another one of those that refuse to use Signal until they implement proper backups.

If people insist on me using Signal to communicate with them, these people probably have far-too-inflexible values concerning privacy for me to bother anyway.

conception

a day ago

You can use imazing to do it and/or scripts if they are synced to macos.

upofadown

a day ago

>Crucially, it's run by a nonprofit organisation...

Sure, but for all we know it is a wholly owned subsidiary of the CIA. See Crypto AG[1].

>...if we all start to do this, it will mean more people are on Signal, hopefully gradually making it more attractive to move across!

Signal is controlled by a single entity and is not federated. So it is only a matter of time before things fall apart. So it is not a good idea to promote it as some sort of messaging standard.

I mean, Signal is OK and is a fine replacement for Whatsapp, but all these rabid expressions of Signal fandom are starting to get annoying.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto_AG

maqp

a day ago

>Sure, but for all we know it is a wholly owned subsidiary of the CIA. See Crypto AG[1].

This is such a sad propaganda tactic.

Signal's client is 100% open source. The Android client has reproducible builds. You can verify yourself the cryptographic primitives are used, and function correctly with test vectors.

E.g. Here's those for the key exchange X25519 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc7748

Here's the test vectors for AES https://csrc.nist.gov/CSRC/media/Projects/Cryptographic-Algo...

>Signal is controlled by a single entity and is not federated. So it is only a matter of time before things fall apart.

It's backed by the Signal foundation, donations, and it doesn't suffer from bike shedding bigger federated systems struggle with. Take OpenPGP v5 fingerprints that are still, 15 years after SHA-1 was considered weak, not available in gpg, if at all. Federated systems and standards bodies with disengaged management are easy to subvert from the inside with tactics like these https://www.404media.co/declassified-cia-guide-to-sabotaging...

>So it is not a good idea to promote it as some sort of messaging standard.

The protocol isn't a standard, but its security properties are the gold standard. That's why it's being used in most networked TCB apps that take their security as serious as they can.

You're also not proposing a solution so I take it you're advocating for Matrix.

31337Logic

a day ago

Thank you for being the voice of reason here.

Signal is the best messaging app in almost every meaningfully measurable way. (Source: me.) People's gripes seem mostly to be around "But my barber still uses WhatsApp"... Yeah, it's called the network effect. So do your part and go promote one of the best "free" apps we all have the privilege of using, before even this option is removed from us.

upofadown

a day ago

>Take OpenPGP v5 fingerprints that are still, 15 years after SHA-1 was considered weak, not available in gpg, if at all.

Assuming you mean V5 PGP keys. There are 2 proposed key formats due to the standards fork which actually supports your argument. But since there is no actual weakness, it is safe to just stick with what people have been using since forever.

SHA-1 is only broken for collisions. Fingerprints do not require collision resistance. PGP used to use only 32 bits of the SHA-1 hash for the short form of the fingerprint. That became problematic because they could be straight up forged from an existing fingerprint so now 64 bits are used. Such fingerprints are trivially collideable simply because of the length. But, again, that is not an issue. You have to look at the security of the system when evaluating things like this, not just looking for particular primitives.

>You're also not proposing a solution so I take it you're advocating for Matrix.

Yeah, fans tend to assume that everyone is a fan of something... Just saying...

maqp

a day ago

>Fingerprints do not require collision resistance.

That's what they're literally there for. To avoid situation where someone generates a key with matching fingerprint, and the person importing the key doesn't detect it's a forgery.

>Yeah, fans tend to assume that everyone is a fan of something... Just saying...

Yeah I'm a fan of adequate computational headroom where it doesn't cost anything.

upofadown

19 hours ago

>To avoid situation where someone generates a key with matching fingerprint...

That would be a preimage attack. No one knows how to do that with SHA-1. The best you could do would be to generate two different keypairs with the same fingerprint. That doesn't have any security implications. ... which is lucky, otherwise we would need unusably long fingerprints in the 256 bit range. Note that Signal effectively only has 100 bits per identity for the key fingerprint (they combine two identities to make the 60 decimal digit safety number). Using a birthday attack, generating a collision would only involve 2^50 operations, which is practically feasible.

jMyles

a day ago

At risk of saying something utterly predictable (and thus, unnecessary) - and indeed, a sibling comment has already made such a prediction:

* It really seems like matrix is superior in every way to both of these.

It is much easier to backup, restore, and change devices (one of the chief complaints about both Signal and WhatsApp of course), has more cognizable (and yet less intrusive!) information displayed about the cryptological situation for any given chat, and is much more flexible. Also, it has clients which are just as stable (at least that's my experience with Element on both linux and android).

My only complaint about the current generation of Element clients is that there is, unless I'm missing something, no way to globally search across all saved chats. Which is really a blocker sometimes when using it for work.

But yeah, at the risk of sounding like I'm blinding emitting the cliche response of "why no my favorite app?!", I really think it's time to ask why we're always using and recommending signal rather than matrix.

tcfhgj

a day ago

> hat I wouldn't say in a public setting, so I don't see a need to forgo good features for privacy.

People are already too deeply invested in convincing people to use Signal and they can't easily amend this choice because Signal is not a Matrix client -> sunk cost fallacy

BrandoElFollito

12 hours ago

Also push your parents and friends to self-host their email /s

Everyone around me uses Whatsapp. 5% use Signal, 2% Yelegram and I know one gal who uses Viber. I have all of them.

Ditch <hugely popular> service is philosophically nice, but like with all of philosophy - pretty much useless in real life.

maqp

a day ago

[flagged]

schlauerfox

a day ago

Sooo where's the list?

I know of Keybase though stagnant after Zoom acquisition.

Matrix.org but it requires a trusted server I think?

Velidchat is new so I don't really know about it.

PGP signed email? Hard to setup and work with.

maqp

a day ago

[flagged]

user

a day ago

[deleted]

brikym

a day ago

Have you heard of BitchAt?

jMyles

a day ago

Is that so wrong?

Signal has some fairly serious deficiencies. That's why, along with it, I have 4 others installed, one of which seems to stand above the rest (and I bet, just reading this, you know which one I mean).

Is it so wrong to say so?

yieldcrv

a day ago

an app per person these days

YarickR2

a day ago

Tell that to my gardener I'm communicating with over WhatsApp regarding lawn. Or to general contractors ; we're discussing some remodeling there too. Or to a hair stylist, doing her business (managing appointments, collecting feedback etc) over the same WhatsApp for the last three years. Sometimes I wonder if privacy crowd is living in some kind of an impenetrable bubble, separating them from the real life and real people. Sometimes I'm very much convinced they are .

noman-land

a day ago

Have you tried telling them that you prefer to use Signal for safety reasons or do you just silently go along with the crowd even though their ignorance puts you both at risk?