Ask HN: How do we know Signal or Telegram don't store our data on their servers?

The Signal app itself is opensource as well various pieces of the tech stack. You can audit yourself what is being sent and how their protocols work. The protocol itself has won awards due to its security and elegance.

There is a lot of good things to say about Signal and you can easily find it all. They have made some annoying or less than ideal features that are opt-out instead of opt-in but they're not sacrificing privacy for them.

If the main danger is, police scanning the phone for compromised material (without a police spyware on it), then there are some ways to deal with it technically, by using services that don't leave a trace. Telegram for example has a "secret chat" function, which won't save the messages, meaning someone scanning your phone later, won't find them.

(which I head is also a main reason for many people to join telegram, because so they can chat with their affairs and not have their wifes read it)

Then there are simply private tabs of chrome or ff, from where you can use chat-services without trace. (if the chat services are not cooperating with the police, or are decentralised by default, I think in that scenario I would use matrix)

Anyway, you live in kashmir?

I know mainly of the conflict by reading Shalimar the Clown, from Rushdie. Just curious about your opinion, if you know the book. I heard it was not well received in Kashmir itself? I think it was very well written, but I don't know how accurate it is.

(1) All Signal messaging is E2EE; (2) they don't store messages on their servers; (3) the client code is open source, and it seems like a good portion of the server code is open source.

Where I think Signal could go further on being the most secure, useful, and privacy-conscious messaging app/company in the world:

1. Open source ALL of the server code. They have something called Signal-Server (https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Server) on their Github, but it's unclear if this is the server they use, or simply a server one could theoretically use to run a private Signal server.

2. Open source all server-side services/infrastructure code that doesn't compromise security in some way.

3. Better features. Signal is currently the most secure and privacy-conscious of the messaging apps, but solidly the worst overall user experience. It's not that it's bad, it's just that the other apps are much better. People like gifs and giphy and emojis and a fast-feeling interface. This is important, because it's hard to be a privacy-conscious individual when all your friends want to text on other apps. At least in my social circle, Signal is still the thing that people jump over to when they want be extra super sure they're not leaving a paper trail, but not the default messaging app they use.

4. Introduce a user-supported business model. This probably makes a lot of people uneasy, and while I appreciate the current grant and donation-based business model (the Wikipedia model), that model comes at great cost of efficiency. By operating effectively as a non-profit, you are inherently in a less competitive position relative to your competitors (the best product and engineering people are more likely to go competitors who can pay more), and you're persistently in fund-raising mode (again, see: Wikipedia). There are lots of ways to skin this cat, maybe the easiest is to ask power users to pay like $5/mo. Or just give people the option to pay with absolutely zero obligation. Some non-zero cohort would inevitably take them up on this.

Most of these suggestions, of course, especially 1-3, are very very hard and come at an enormous cost. Building in public as an open source business seems to massively slows things down and introducing a huge amount of community management overhead. That said I'm sure there are ways to manage/mitigate those costs.