"Asked to comment specifically on whether Facebook/WhatApp had accessed users’ messages and whether it had done so at the request of government agencies or other third parties, it directed the Guardian to its site that details aggregate data on government requests by country."
This is why people should try and use Signal instead of WhatsApp. You can't trust Facebook to care about your privacy.
Ahem. Don't they also have contact information? From https://whispersystems.org/blog/contact-discovery/ and lack of future follow-ups on the subject, I believe they do. Possibly, hashed or obfuscated, but still recoverable.
Which must mean either I'm misunderstanding something (e.g. things had changed since the blog post was published and relevant GitHub issues were closed), or they had not disclosed some information they have to the US government, or they (or word of mouth, retelling the story) is misinforming users about what was disclosed.
(Upd: Yes, it would be a good idea to go through Signal source code and see what exactly is sent, before making any suggestions that may look like an accusation, but... sorry, the code is quite complicated and I don't think I can figure this out any fast. I found ContactTokenDetails class, but lost my way trying to trace its usage and how it's wrapped/encrypted/etc.)
Seems that they either somehow don't have contact info (but then - how contact discovery's working?) or they had failed to comply with court order.
Or I'm really not getting something, which is also well possible (and quite probable) explanation.
I think they just don't keep the contact list. It is uploaded, but only matched against the list of subscribed users at the time of the upload and then deleted. Only downside is that if a contact joins later and does not have you in its contact list you don't get notified, or only when you recheck your contact list.
Your link above says at the end:
For TextSecure, however, we've grown beyond the size where that remains practical, so the only thing we can do is write the server such that it --- doesn't store the transmitted contact information ---, inform the user, and give them the choice of opting out.
I often give Signal another chance, but it's UI is horrible. Some messages are not delivered, some are delivered only to Signal Desktop but not to my cell phone so I'm only notified days after the message was sent...
Signal Desktop is pretty bad, but their Android client is top-notch. One of the best messaging apps I've ever used. It integrates with SMS seamlessly, does inline replies directly from the notification, smartwatch support, Giphy support, etc
I have also had my share of delivery problems. But I'm on iOS and there is no alternative to Signal. So I ended up using iMessages most of the time, and Signal only for confidential stuff or when the recipient is on Android.
What I want is: 1) desktop/tablet and phone message delivery, with sane notifications and reliability, 2) doesn't feed all my messages to an ad company, 3) works on my non-Apple devices (otherwise iMessage would be entirely sufficient), and 4) good enough that I can get people to switch (or transparently uses SMS, so it doesn't matter).
Signal fails 1 (the desktop app is pretty bad) and 4 (too many little problems, others won't switch). I'm starting to think Slack, of all things, might be my best solution. Really, I just want ICQ with smart phone/desktop notifications, and picture/video embedding, which doesn't seem like it should be a thing I ought to have any difficulty whatsoever tracking down in 2017.
Signal is bad as explained previously, it requires Google on your phone to even work.
If you think Google is more trustworthy than Facebook, sure go ahead and just use Hangouts or whatever.
We cant have nice good encryption and safe communication when geeks push this Signal onto unsuspecting users, when the real option is to keep improving Tox.Chat and bitmessage.
A legitimate criticism is that they make it hard for people who don't want to use play services to user their app. For the privacy of the messages themselves, google really cannot interfere, unlike WhatsApp/Facebook.
There are certainly people who want to use Signal without Google services.
I don't know how legitimate a complaint it is since Moxie et al have said that they would accept a well written pull request which provides similar functionality. But this just hasn't been forthcoming.
What I dislike about Signal mentions on HN is that aggressive posters conflate a number of different issues people have with Signal - lack of federation, reliance on Google push notifications, lack of SMS support, etc - and somehow lump them in together.
[Just to be clear - I am not saying you are doing this].
I don't have a lot of skin in the game, but I am genuinely curious as to what you mean. How else other than "lump[ing] them in together", would you comprehensively criticize it?
I mean, two things good about Signal is that it let's you chat with friends and family in a secure manner.
There are these following issues though: I doesn't federate, it relies on Google Push, it doesn't support SMS. Also, I don't like how Signal does [...]"
Is that already an invalid way to make an argument ?
You're correct. That would be a fine way to make a comprehensive criticism.
I was trying to express frustration with posters who start out with a nebulous complaint like "Signal is bad and OWS is evil". If called on this they come back with "It allows Google to spy on you", if countered they come back with "it doesn't allow freedom to federate" and so on.
Rather than being a multi pronged criticism it's more like a bait and switch, with each new argument being deployed when the previous one is rendered invalid.
AFAIK, Play Services is controlled by Google and has system-level permissions, so it could easily access Signal messages post-decryption if Google wanted it to.
That part of Android is open source, so you could in theory audit it and build it yourself. I would be surprised if any big deliberate backdoors hid there. There are large downstream projects that use this source and builds on it which potentially would notice.
The Play Services however pretty much amounts to a remote root shell open at all times. Google can remove or modify code at will, and they have been known to do it in practice for spyware removal. I can understand how an activist finds that problematic.
This makes no sense in so many ways. I suggest you read more on exactly how Signal relies on Google. It does not at all compromise the encryption protocol. Also Tox? Good luck with that.
I am currently trying out tox with a small number of friends (ok, one friend). I am curious as to what your criticism of tox is. While it seems it's still a bit new, it seems it does all that it claims to do.
He never said it was. Google services aren't isolated like normal apps either, as far as I know they can access other app's data (when installing cyanogenmod, I had to install google apps in some weird way from the bootloader because it has to change protected things on the phone). His point of requiring google's stuff to be installed is valid, even if he wrote it thinking payload gets sent over it.
Stock Android does not, by inspecting network traffic, contact Google servers.
Google play services and other GApps, do, and they can be exploited in this traffic, or told by Google to activate other backdoors.
Signal with GApps, Google can know which phones, and which users, are using Signal, thats a security vulnerability. Google can infer from their Google-messaging thing, that notifications are sent, and have a high probability of knowing if it is to Signal. Who talks when is leaked to Google.
Because it's likely someone would have noticed if every AOSP phone called third party servers (or something like that). Plenty of people made Android derivatives, modded it, or just compiled it to toy with. Of course there's no guarantee without a full audit (and even with an audit, they might miss something), but I trust AOSP a lot more than a closed source app suite.
This is why people should try and use Signal instead of WhatsApp. You can't trust Facebook to care about your privacy.