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Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

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Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#241

Post by macNchz »

Dunedan wrote: post #2

> Storage: $1.3 million dollars per year. > Servers: $2.9 million dollars per year. > Registration Fees: $6 million dollars per year. > Total Bandwidth: $2.8 million dollars per year. > Additional Services: $700,000 dollars per year. Signal pays more for delivering verification SMS during sign-up, than for all other infrastructure (except traffic) combined. Wow, that sounds excessive.

Out of interest, their top vendor costs on their 2021 form 990:

$7m Twilio

$4m Microsoft

$3m AWS

$1.3m Google

https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/824...

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#242

Post by lxgr »

barbazoo wrote: post #218
bloggie wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny, because that's the reason I can't use Signal - I don't have a phone number.

In case one isn't aware, you can get a $1/month throwaway phone number from Twilio for that purpose.

That's a neat workaround for the people that can figure that out, but doesn't change the underlying problem for the majority of users at all.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#243

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

chimeracoder wrote: post #202
blakesterz wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twitter said that's why they got rid of the SMS 2FA. They said it was costing millions to have that enabled for them. https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/18/business/twitter-blue-two-fac...

> Twitter said that's why they got rid of the SMS 2FA. They said it was costing millions to have that enabled for them. Previous Twitter employees have said that this is incorrect. Because Twitter began as an SMS-only (and then SMS-first) application (remember 40404?), they very early on established direct-connection infrastructure for sending SMS, meaning that they have a marginal cost of literally $0.00/message in…

> they very early on established direct-connection infrastructure for sending SMS, meaning that they have a marginal cost of literally $0.00/message in most markets.

I am very, very interested to understand how that works, because without more detail or sources I'm calling bullshit. I definitely understand how Twitter could have greatly reduced their per-message fee with telecom providers, but at the end of the day Twitter is not a telecom and is still at the mercy of whoever is that "last mile" for actually delivering the SMS to your phone, so I don't understand how they have no marginal cost here. Happy to be proven wrong.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#244

Post by rezonant »

explaininjs wrote: post #184
supriyo-biswas wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Phone number verification is used to verify the user's registration intent, so not really.

A Flow: > Service A => User: Please Enter Your Phone Number and Email > Service A => Clearinghouse: Please verify phone number XXX wants to sign up for an account with us > Clearinghouse => User (SMS): Please respond with the Email you used at signup to confirm you want an account with Service A Later... > Service B => User: Please Enter Your phone number and Email > Service B => Clearinghouse: Please verify phone nu…

This does not reduce the overall cost, it just shifts it to the clearinghouse. Who pays the clearinghouse so that they can cover their own exorbitant SMS costs?

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#247

Post by nottorp »

ThinkBeat wrote: post #131

I am too cynical by far, but Signal being run by an ex-Googler is not at all reassuring me of its long-term commitments to security and privacy.

To be cynical in another direction, if it wasn't run by an ex-Googler it would probably cost 1/3 of what it does now to run it :)

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#249

Post by ParetoOptimal »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #212
itslennysfault wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If only someone would release a universal protocol that the app's native messaging apps could utilize to eliminate the need for these 3rd party messaging apps. Oh, right, it's called RCS and Apple refuses to support it.

> only someone would release a universal protocol Nobody wants this. Universal access means universal access for spammers. iMessage won over SMS because of cost and spam filtering.

> Nobody wants this.

Not nobody.

> iMessage won over SMS because of cost and spam filtering.

Really? I've never used imessage.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#250

Post by lxgr »

tapoxi wrote: post #14
java-man wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, decouple Signal user identity from the phone number.

This will probably never happen. One of the reasons WhatsApp blew up is because using a phone number as your source of identification means there's much less friction in the signup flow. No username/password to create and your social graph is already there in your contact list. My mom was able to get our entire extended family on Signal without my involvement, which is a testament to how easy that is.

Nobody is demanding them to stop supporting phone numbers as identifiers/verification methods.

I'm not mad at all if somebody prefers using their phone number and not having a password for a service – just give me the option to use my email address and/or a username.

There are too many "phone number only" services out there these days.

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