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It’s a good move; it shows they are no interested in popularity but Privacy and Security
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It’s the same argument they used when ditching SMS-support ☹️
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Except most people are not going to tolerate having a multiplicity of apps, and if people in your circle don’t already use signal, they definitely won’t now. Whereas previously, I was getting pretty decent traction from people slowly adding it.
In the modern age, it’s getting easier to hard-line your messaging platform though.
If people are already used to having multiple messaging clients for multiple people, it’s less of a jump to add one more.
This has been my experience as well. In the past friends and family were more reluctant to break away from whatever their default communication app was. These days most people are already familiar with the idea of using one thing to text, another to “message”, and often more than that. I’ve had great success converting people to more secure platforms now that they understand the process.
Don’t the built in system apps also vacuum data?
This is Lemmy. Here we believe everything vacuums data!
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Yeah we’re like super serious about privacy so we require you to make you’re account based on a unique, hard to change, personally identifiable, insecure data point and require you to show it to everyone you talk to. The fact that they’re only now starting to test hiding your phone number is beyond asinine. Any arguments signal has about security I might listen to but their concept of privacy is laughable.
a net negative for Signal users some of which will have to install WhatsApp since they won’t be able to afford not to have those conversations.
I just had to do exactly this for a little league group 😭
Ugh, okay Meredith, let’s pretend it’s impossible to handle this with user experience that makes the user acknowledge their conversation with a WhatsApp user is not secure. Meanwhile if the only viable way for this conversion to occur is to have WhatsApp on both ends, the situation less secure.
It is a privacy concern, not a security one.
So according to Meredith, the choice is between less overall security or not having conversations with people who don’t use Signal.
Could you cite this please? Because I do not see this beeing said or implied.
That could makes sense for her salary but it surely is a net negative for Signal users some of which will have to install WhatsApp since they won’t be able to afford not to have those conversations.
Entirley different conversation, accusations and projections. So dropping this.
It’s doable we are not in the kindergarten and school groups we might miss a few things but worked so fast for us. And I convinced both my job teams to use Signal
Ugh, okay Meredith, let’s pretend it’s impossible to handle this with user experience that makes the user acknowledge their conversation with a WhatsApp user is not secure. Meanwhile if the only viable way for this conversion to occur is to have WhatsApp on both ends, the situation less secure.
I don’t agree with this. The only way to have the conversation is to have Signal at both ends.
while i see where you’re coming from, being able to message WhatsApp users from a client app that respects privacy would be better than being forced to have WhatsApp installed on your device, with it snooping casually on your everyday device usage and your contact list and so on.
WhatsApp is the only Facebook app on my phone and i’d love to get rid of it without losing the ability to message all those buffons using it (which make up for 99% of my social circle)
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while i see where you’re coming from, being able to message WhatsApp users from a client app that respects privacy would be better than being forced to have WhatsApp installed on your device
Who’s forcing you? I removed everything Zuckerberg and just informed people I use only Signal now. I had to help my parents a bit with the install and the pin, younger than 70s did it themselves. I found that, if you have a reason for boycotting, people will just give you a hundred MB of their phone space and install Signal along with whatsapp
Exactly. Let us choose if we want to interact with WhatsApp or not.
I’d be ready to sacrifice some security in order to not have WhatsApp installed on my phone.
Of course it would be cool to just get rid of WhatsApp but I can’t force my whole basketball team to go on Threema…
Signal refusing to federate with WhatsApp, even though meta says they will still use the signal protocol is the most bone headed decision I have ever seen from them.
There no better chance to break the network effect than this.
Meta could easily have the WhatsApp client upload decryption keys to their servers without any notification to the user.
Not sure what you mean, of course WhatsApp can disable it’s own encryption. That would be an argument for open source third party apps and interoperability.
What I’m talking about has nothing to do with the line protocol. Each client has encryption key pairs. The public key of the first party shares it with the other parties, and vice versa. If it’s encrypted with the public key then the private key can decrypt it.
If Meta gets the private keys, they can decrypt any message they want independent of whatever protocol is being used.
But aren’t these key pairs generated per session and/or per contact? So once you switch to a more secure / auditable client this only matters when communicating with people on whatsapp. But they presumably have a backdoor in their app for the NSA anyway.
No body said it’s going to have the same level of security, but that still doesn’t mean that should just give up on it, just put a small icon indicating this is a WhatsApp user.
Yeah that sucks, Signal is my preferred app and I wish I could get rid of WhatsApp without having to convert everyone.
Yeah this is very stupid. But I never liked Signal anyway.
Is there a matrix protocol based app that is planning to “federate”?
Realistically there is going to be a bridge which you can either self host or use to federate matrix.
Every Matrix protocol server, excluding some experimental or internal for a company ones, are federating? And it’s not an app as you can choose an app, the protocol defines client<>server spec too.
I mean “federate” with whatsapp. Apparently there is a bridge https://github.com/tulir/whatsmeow
Okey
me neither
Meta wants to federate with the whole fediverse eventually. This is first up, then Threads. Remains to be seen if they’ll bother with a Lemmy instance but I wouldn’t be shocked.
So far though the response by the fediverse has been “nah”.
It’s… I guess the ghost of their XMPP abandonment.
EEE at its finest, like they did to XMPP
Wasn’t it google?
Both Google and Facebook.
I really wish my country didn’t rely so much on whatsapp
This is why it annoys me every time someone brings up that SMS/iMessage is a US only problem. Whilst this may be true, for a lot of us WhatsApp is no different. Particularly now that Meta owns WhatsApp.
Whatsapp has been owned by Facebook since 2014. It was created in 2009. That’s 5 years without Facebook, 10 with :/
It’s been that long? Wow.
Extremely bad take in my opinion. Not supporting alternatives means you force users into installing the alternatives
People could be using WhatsApp if they cared about it, but they chose signal for a reason. And making signal weaken its privacy for the purpose of reaching more people is against everything they stand for.
The trouble is we end up having to install both when we could be only using Signal
Same goes for people who you convince to install Signal. They’ll end up never using it because they just forget about it and they’re not the ones who wanted to use it anyway. Being able to message people on WhatsApp through Signal would also make it a lot more easy to convince people to install it.
And once those people have it installed, they’ll talk to each other using signal-to-signal as opposed to signal-to-whatsapp!
It pretty much solves the chicken and egg problem, and yet they’re scoffing at it as a solution. IMO it’s a big mistake.
Using only signal in such a scenario is like using only whatsapp today, to chat with whatsapp contacts. What are you hoping to gain?
But it’s not the same - there’s a community of people doing the same thing, and with those contacts you’ll be using Signal.
I would use signal if I could convince people to use signal.
I could convince people to use Signal if all their conversations were on signal and they could talk to people on WhatsApp in a seamless way.
Right now you MUST have WhatsApp if you have any kind of social life. Signal is the other app that no one has because it’s kind of a pain in the ass to have two messaging apps.
I would love to switch to Signal, but inter-compatibility with WhatsApp is a must. The EU is essentially handing them a golden opportunity on a silver platter to become a mainstream app, and they are like nah, we good wtf
This is correct, and everybody who complains about how “hard” it is to use more than one messenger app is pathetic. That’s like the epitome of first world problems. People should be GLAD that they have the option of using Signal, instead of whining about how they didn’t build it the way they wanted it to be.
Nope. Fuck people stupid enough to use FBInc at all.
Clearly written by someone from somewhere where WhatsApp isn’t de facto mandatory.
Yup and no fucks given.
Ooh you’re hard.
If you think think such of no respect for the FBInc or fucking any closed source software then, yeah, duh.
I was hoping to move to signal in the whatapp network. Unfortunately in Brazil you cannot live without whatapp.
You could try and run both
Keep whatsapp, and slowly switch contacts to Signal (it might just be close friends and family). That’s what people around me are doing
My wife told me to fuck off when I installed signal on her phone 😔
Haha, that’s kinda funny. Then people are like.
Just tell your friends and family to stop using iMessage. Like everyone will be ok to switch their routine just like that.
It’s definitely not for everyone. For me it’s
- some use signal with me / others exclusively, sending the occasional message elsewhere when on a certain device or sharing within a platform
- some use signal for sensitive conversations, and use other platforms most of the time
- some just don’t. If I need to have a sensitive conversation with them, I do it in person
Sounds like you need some matrix bridges in your life.
It’s on my list of things to explore soon 😄
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Honestly I started looking into a few of the easier ones and its a damn process so which one am I bridging? All of them. One at a time.
I managed to convince one long distance friend a few years ago. So now I need to keep Signal just to be able to communicate with him.
It’s not about converting people close to you. In some situations, you’re asking them to install an app just to talk to you, while everyone else they talk to is on WhatsApp. I personally have to use WhatsApp for work and for personal, otherwise I’d literally not get those messages. There’s no option when, if you stop a random person on the street, regardless of what OS their phone is running, and ask to look at their phone, it’s going to have WhatsApp installed. It’s like your phone having email; who the fuck doesn’t have email? It’s the same with Whatsapp, it’s just assumed you have it.
This is a centralization problem. Come and force federation upon my SimpleX server in Iceland!
Indeed. I wish your comment was the most visible here.
Signal and Threema can be all about privacy, but they are still companies which can make money only by keeping their service as centralized as possible.
Decentralised messaging like Matrix, XMPP, Jami, have no issue with interoperability.
You’ll be happy to know it’s the top comment thread, at least in Sync
I’m using sync, it’s the second top-most for me.
Signal is developped by a non-profit.
You are right.
upvote for SimpleX
SimpleX looked pretty intriguing…is it basically a better / private / more secure replacement for IRC?
pretty much, though it’s pretty basic in terms of functionality at the moment
On the one hand I agree with them sticking to their guns re: adamantly protecting privacy.
On the other, the number of contacts I have using signal has dropped off a cliff, from 12 to just one. It certainly isn’t rising. The people I know who used it have abandoned it and went back to WhatsApp.
Getting rid of SMS support was a mistake.
I’d personally prefer that when messaging with someone using WhatsApp, they make clear to you that Facebook can and will have some metadata, but not the contents of the chat itself. Shit, make it opt-in.
A big part of why nobody uses signal is because… nobody uses signal. If you could still talk to people on WhatsApp, the de facto standard in most of the world bar the US and China, more people might give it a try, and thus more people over time would be having signal-to-signal conversations.
IMO a good but imperfect solution is preferable to nobody using Signal, which is the realistic alternative.
I’ll continue donating to Signal, but much like their SMS decision, I believe this to be a mistake that will severely hamper adoption.
I’d personally prefer that when messaging with someone using WhatsApp, they make clear to you that Facebook can and will have some metadata, but not the contents of the chat itself.
If you believe that, then I think you’re one of Zuckerberg’s proverbial “dumb fucks”. Not that I mean to be insulting, but that’s literally what he thinks of his users.
Facebook’s WhatsApp is almost certainly filled with backdoors and exploits. In particular, with Android they often bypass Play Store checks by bundling system apps directly via the manufacturer.
Calling someone a dumb fuck, even indirectly by using Zuck’s famous quote, is quite rude. People aren’t dumb fucks because they are forced into using WhatsApp.
Maybe you’re from the US or somewhere where iMessage, SMS, or WeChat dominate, but here, you either use WhatsApp, or you become an outcast. Whatsapp is de facto mandatory. Even half of my delivery notifications and 2FA comes to my WhatsApp, not SMS. When people say “just don’t use WhatsApp”, they may as well be saying “just don’t use email”.
I don’t want to be one of Zuck’s users. That’s why I want an open and secure protocol for cross-client messaging. So I and others can use something else without being isolated from friends and family. Being lonely isn’t pleasant.
Facebook’s WhatsApp is almost certainly filled with backdoors and exploits
Perhaps it is. We can never know due to its proprietary nature… which is why I don’t want to use it.
As it stands, I can use Signal with one contact. The rest refuse to use it, or used it and abandoned it.
It would be amazing if everyone woke up tomorrow and flocked to signal, but here in the real world, outside of my fantasies, I have to go with the standard, which unfortunately is WhatsApp.
The only other alternative is SMS which is far worse in terms of both security and privacy, and would also cut me off from talking with friends as I’d have no group chat access and because nobody uses SMS.
My choice is between:
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being alone and unable to talk to anybody, but being a privacy purist.
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conceding some metadata but retaining private chats and using a client I want to use. It would also bring more people to signal as they also won’t be locked out from chatting with others. Overall I’d gain signal-to-signal contacts, as well as imperfect signal-to-whatsapp ones.
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giving in entirely and using Facebook software.
To me, there’s an obvious answer there. It’s not perfect, but it’s better than the others.
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I would state it even more generally, something like “when chatting with WhatsApp/Facebook Messenger users Signal can only ensure no data is shared with third parties from your device …” or something around the lines of that
they make clear to you that Facebook can and will have some metadata, but not the contents of the chat itself.
You thought you’re safe and private when the content is encrypted? LOL, no. Metadata are much more useful to Facebook, and to the intelligence services.
“We Kill People Based on Metadata.” – General Michael Hayden, former Director of NSA and CIA
My point isn’t that metadata isn’t useful for them, there’s no need to be condescending about things I never said.
My point is metadata should be protected as content does. While IM platform needs to know which message should be delived to whom, they don’t need that after being delivered, nor have it profiled.
Agreed.
I disagree. When sending SMS you are leaking info like when, to whom and how big message you sent to a lot of spying agencies.
You do that regardless of which app you use to send SMS.
That’s why I don’t use SMS at all
Cool, but that’s not an argument against SMS support in Signal.
Perfect is the enemy of good
This is exactly the problem. If they support interoperability then they will allow their users to continue using the Signal app which has high security standards, even if the particular conversation is not as secure as native signal conversations and they can’t control what the third-party app does. This will help grow the Signal network (because now it is easier for WhatsApp users to incrementally switch to Signal) and become more secure.
By rejecting interoperability they may be slightly improving the privacy of the 1% of users where their conversation partner would have switched to Signal, but are harming privacy the 99% of users that will now need to switch to WhatsApp for those converstions and are harming their future network growth (which would bring even more users to a private solution).
That’s a bummer. Means I have no alternative but to keep using WhatsApp then.
you’re getting downvoted for not being American 💀
I’ve had this conversation before. The consensus last time was that I should tell every single person on my contacts list to download Signal if they want to stay in touch and if they refuse it means they’re shitty people that don’t care about me but I’m totally not a shitty person for forcing my preferences onto others.
People don’t realize that in most of Europe WhatsApp is more popular than iMessages are in the US. Not having WhatsApp means you’re not texting to anyone.
Yep. And it’s not just a Europe thing. WhatsApp is basically the only messaging app in South Asia, West Asia, south America and a lot of parts in Africa. Telling someone to stop using WhatsApp here is like telling an American to stop using E-Mail ans SMS.
Well for me it works and I have most of my people on either Signal or threema though threema is getting slowly obsolete
Americans have something even worse: SMS
A huge amount of them, and the vast majority of younger people, have iMessage.
I never really understood why is it so complicated to also have Signal on the phone? I mean most people have a shit ton of stupid apps anyway. It’s not like it slows your phone down or anything. Just use Signal as well until most people also have it, and then you can choose to ditch the other apps. It’s like one extra icon in your app list. Also this is the fastest way to ditch shit apps, have everyone use Signal in parallel with the shit ones.
I’ve had Signal installed for years. There’s like 3 of my contacts that I never talk to anyway. Most people use facebook and tiktok and can’t even bother installing an adblocker. They’re not interested about a privacy focused messenger when they already got WhatsApp.
I converted all of my friends, and family. But it hasn’t been easy that’s for sure.
Wholeheartedly agree, but most people wont do it, so you end up with signal for 1 or 2 friends, telegram for a few others, and all the crap ones for the rest (whatsapp, slack, teams, messenger, etc)
Ive ditched every messaging app but signal and telegram, and its really annoying sometimes
What sort of irks me is what a mixed bag EU regulation is. Some is good (GDPR), not denying that. Some is annoying (you’re going to be accepting cookies 100 times a day until you’re dead thanks to them), and Whatsapp runs on all devices, so while interoperability nice, even as a free-software, Linux person I don’t really care.
However, if you have to deal with friends or family in the US and you don’t have an iPhone though, god help you. They don’t care about this.
I guess my complaint is that EU regulation may seem legally elegant, but I think it is sometimes quite blind to the real situation on the ground.
It looks good on the books but we still, say, don’t have a standard ARM boot process for smartphones that would help users not be dependent on whatever shitty ROM the OEM wants them to have. That would be life changing, but it will never even be talked about.
I partially agree with you, and of course I hate those cookie banners, they’re completely annoying.
But please remember that it’s not the EU’s fault is every website is trying to violate your privacy.
If websites weren’t tracking everything you do, then cookie banners wouldn’t be needed.
I think we should collectively ask for websites to stop spying on us, not changing the cookie banners regulation.
That’s already a solution to cookie banners: the “do not track” setting. It’s been tested in court in Germany and confirmed to count as rejected permission for GDPR purposes. Websites dinky have to obey it.
It’s currently slowly gaining traction, there’s a privacy advocacy group suing high profile targets over this to create awareness.
We also need a formal change to the cookie law/GDPR to acknowledge “do not track” as the preferred method. Then the banners will slowly go away.
Yep, all the EU done is forced websites to have consent if the website want to process personal data. There are many analytics that does not process IP address or fingerprint and so does not require consent banner. Be annoyed on the websites, not this law.
And yet we live in a world where consent spam is actually harder to deal with than tracking, if you’re smart.
The cookie consent also has a huge fail whale of unintended consequences - training users to click [accept], or really [anything], to make the annoyance just go away.
And nefarious actors have their run of the place now. They can slip onerous terms into EULAs and know they will largely be accepted.
As well as random [Continue] boxes to install malware or whatever they want since users are so well trained to click just to get it the fuck off their screen.
That wont hold in court tho
Whatsapp runs on all devices
Nope. Android, iOS, Windows and Mac are not all devices. And web versions are far from ideal (some may suggest expanding web capabilities, but please don’t).
Mimimimimimimimimi
If you have nothing to say, say nothing at all.
Same to you, bud
just get an extension and adblocker filters to automatically dismiss/block cookie dialogs and use an allowlist for sites from which you actually need to persist cookies in your browser’s settings and set your browser to delete everything else on exit. With Firefox and browsers based on it you can, in addition to that, use container tabs (try sticky containers extension) for even better context isolation.
Obviously. But that is very difficult on mobile.
on Firefox if a desktop addon has no mobile version you can look up how to add custom add-ons collections when it comes to cookie prompt blockers, but ublock origin and adding filters to it work out of the box. Recently also some apps started showing cookie prompts with no option to decline unless you pay, if they can work offline, make them so
Interesting. I’ll check it out. I didn’t know that.
(BTW from my understanding of the law sites cannot block functionality if you decline cookies. But it is rarely enforced)
Wait and see what happens when Google removes traditional tracking from Chrome and every sites start requiring registration to access content !
Right. That’s a very different business model. I don’t necessarily have an opinion about whether it would be better or worse. It is easier to look at our current problems and say it would be better. But, eh, I can block most trackers and be a leach off of websites that stay up by selling other people’s data. shrug
There is one thing about interoperability that I don’t see many people talking about:
Your messages going to and being handled by other services means you’d be subject to their TOS and privacy policy as well.
As long as services are transparent about it so users can make informed decisions based on it, that’s generally fine.
But then services like Beeper, or just Matrix bridges in general, make it so anyone can setup such a connection between services without their contacts even knowing about it.
Your messages going to and being handled by other services means you’d be subject to their TOS and privacy policy as well.
This is true of literally every one of your contacts, too. When you send someone a message, they can screenshot, copy, archive, and forward however they see fit (and most people don’t govern themselves by any kind of TOS or privacy policy). Which then means that if any one of your contacts chooses to use another service as a bridge, or as an archival tool, you’re naturally going to expose your messages to that service, on that contact’s terms.
But that isn’t about interoperability per se. It’s about how other people store and use their copy of data shared between multiple users. Apple iMessage isn’t interoperable with anything, but users still have conversations archived all the way back to the beginning of the service over a decade ago, and can choose to export those messages to be saved elsewhere. (For example, I use a bridge for iMessage so that I can view them on my Android phone, but the mechanism is software that leverages the Mac’s accessibility API).
Some of us are data hoarders. If you’re gonna have a conversation with people like me, you’ll have to trust that we don’t use those archives in a way that either inadvertently/negligently or intentionally exposes that data to some bad actor. I’d like to think I do a good job of respecting my friends’ privacy, and secure my systems, but I’m probably not perfect.
You’re not wrong but a friend (maybe even inadvertently) being negligent with my message, and a business structurally sending my message (received from my friend’s app) to third parties seems like a different ballpark.
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I understand her point and imho that’s what makes signal a superior option to the others but because of these extreme choices I’ve seen the usage of signal gradually go down (might be wrong for the total number of users) around me. Now I don’t anyone who uses signal anymore.
it’s a real shame it’s ridiculous to be using whatsapp but I have whatsapp installed on my phone not signal because that’s what everyone uses.
Signal were fools to remove the SMS support from their app. That was a good way to get people in to use the system - they could have insecure SMS chats with those not on signal, and secure signal chats with those on it. The app would warn you when someone didn’t have signal and the chat was insecure.
It was a really good “trojan horse” route into people’s lives. I was using signal every day and it was easier encouraging others to make the switch because it was a convenient app.
Then the devs removed that and dumped all their users back onto other SMS apps.
Now I have 3 apps - an SMS app, Signal and WhatsApp. I barely ever use Signal now. I want to use it more but so few people I know use it, and it’s not the first place people message me from.
Removing SMS support was a huge strategic misstep. They should have been the bridge for people to move from SMS to secure chat.
While I do think you are correct, you have to remember a few things:
- SMS really isn’t used outside the US (and iMessage pretty much was the death of text messages and now iMessage also supports RCS)
- Open source projects can be strict about following a moral code
- Anything more than just sending secure messages is just an attack vector and more layers of code to maintain
Idk about other countries. But in India, SMS is pretty big for businesses to send updates to the customers. Like 2FA for bank transactions, delivery tracking, govt alerts etc. Customer to customer is almost nil except on rare occasions when maybe the internet is down and you need to send an urgent text.
And I should mention that domestic SMS is free (included with any active cellular plan)
Very good point. I did forget about that. That’s pretty much the only time most of my family will look at actual SMS messages.
A bit offtopic, but, are SMS free on the US?
Indeed, in my country SMS are not used at all. Too expensive compared to alternatives.
Here I pay 1 euro per month extra for unlimited calls+SMS. Still no one uses it.
Most plans include unlimited text messaging.
I got my whole family on it, and generally all my closest friends have it as at least a backup. As the other chat apps falter it’s been easier to convert people.
So then it seems completely absurd signal is “not interested” in allowing any integration. They could just notify their users communications with WhatsApp users are unsecure.
I tried switching to Signal a couple years ago but I had to return to WhatsApp since literally no one of my friends and acquaintances did the jump. It wasn’t even considered an option by many. So it was either returning to Whatsapp or being cut off from everyone.
If people were a bit more open-minded Signal could be a good alternative. But alas…
can’t have 2 apps installed?
It’s still installed but it’s kind of difficult to use if no one I know is even willing to try.
Matrix will implement a bridge using the new api, that’s enough for me.
