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Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

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Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#291

Post by alternatex »

pierat wrote: post #191
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.

Sounds like a great case to get the fuck away from SMS and phone numbers. But hey, they still want your whole address book, and announce you're on signal to everyone else on signal. The whole "secure" thing is a joke. Its all linked to your identity via your phone#.

They want the address book because if you don't have engagement promotion features like that, there is no way to ever become remotely popular in the chat app space.

Why is the security a joke? The data is e2e encrypted, and isn't related to a phone number in any way after registration. Do you know of a better way of combining privacy and anti-abuse measures? If you don't offload identity checks to telecom providers during registration some bad actor will immediately create a million accounts and send millions of spam messages and destroy the slim chance of this type of app to exist for free.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#292

Post by newscracker »

collaborative wrote: post #159

FB only wanted whatsapp to preempt a potential competitor. They are happy to give the service for free (at a loss) There is no room for monetization because of FB. In other words, you can't compete with a monopoly, even if you are in a different business. They simply take all

FB is getting and using some metadata from WhatsApp. FB also said it would be introducing ads in WhatsApp. While WhatsApp may not be raking in a lot of money, it’s not a complete loss for Meta either.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#293

Post by JLCarveth »

cmiles74 wrote: post #168
lxgr wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, I see what you mean. That's not what I'd call iMessage though, that's just SMS: The iOS application is called "Messages"; iMessage is the over-the-top Apple-exclusive messaging service.

Messages inflexible reliance on SMS for communication to non-Apple devices is definitely an Apple issue, in my opinion. Apple has made it clear that they continue to default to SMS for non-iPhone communication solely because it's unpleasant for everyone involved.

https://www.android.com/get-the-message/

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#294

Post by lxgr »

leptons wrote: post #182
V__ wrote: post #36

Signal had 40 million active users in 2021 [1]. With 14 million in infra cost, that comes to .35 per user/year. Total expenses are about 33 million, so about .825 per user/year. All in all that seems very reasonable. [1] https://www.businessofapps.com/data/signal-statistics/

I'd be happy to pay $1/year for signal, and I'd pay $2/year if it were decoupled from my phone number.

If you pay Signal $1/year, they'll realistically see about 60-70 cents of that – and that's only considering payment processor fees.

Now add the cost of providing support (it's a paid product now!), payment handling on their end (in a privacy-preserving way, which excludes most common payment methods), and top it off with the immense damage to the network effect by excluding all the users that can't or simply don't want to pay $1/year...

Donations seem like the much better option here.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#295

Post by GabeIsko »

charles_f wrote: post #279

You have to appreciate the complete transparency, gently nudging towards giving without ever begging for it. Refreshing compared to the alternative that Wikipedia is showing, with the tantrum-like emails we receive from their CEO like "LAST REMINDER" or "We've had enough" ; which they ironically send to people who gave.

Those are just non-profit fundraiser consulting tactics. Don't take them personally, just ignore them. The reason they exist is that Wikipedia has too much money, so they spend some on consultants who say they can raise more. It's weird, but that's how the world works.

I would much prefer the Wikipedia endowment model of non-profit orgs. They have a standard operating procedure with a predictable budget, and endowment that let's them run indefinitely, and we just have to suffer through pledge drives. I just block them with ublock filters. I gave them 6 dollars back in 2012, and according to their marketing that is enough for life.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#296

Post by [deleted] »

nwellinghoff wrote: post #282

Wish they provided some numbers of actual messages, type etc. per day. Seems like a good game plan would be. 1) Get off the major cloud providers that charge insane egress fees. 2) Remove SMS verification. A simple solution might be the app gives you a code and then you dial in to them and punch in the code to them. Like a reverse voice based authentication. 3) Remove voice and video calling for non donating users. 3…

[deleted]

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#297

Post by crossroadsguy »

SahAssar wrote: post #35
minedwiz wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're in luck: https://www.theverge.com/2023/11/9/23953603/signal-username-...

They will still require a phone number, it's just a alias.

I just hope they don’t expose phone numbers if a conversation was started on usernames and one or both parties have phone numbers saved. I hope it is not this bad - something Telegram does.

Also preferably clearing differentiating username and phone number messages.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#298

Post by JumpCrisscross »

raesene9 wrote: post #215
vore wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- That's $338k/head on average. At face value for a nonprofit, I'd like these costs broke down as this seems excessive. There is far cheaper IT labor available outside SV. You get what you pay for, though. $338k/year seems like a reasonable salary for people working on something as privacy critical as Signal – just because you're working for a nonprofit doesn't mean you have to work for less competitive wages.

Whilst competitive salaries are important, it's fair to say that, outside of the US, you can get good people for a lot less than $338k/year. To give one example of a (not that cheap) market, outside of London average developer salaries are probably under $50k in the UK. Even accounting for additional costs like taxation and equipment, that's likely to be under $100k fully loaded.

> outside of London average developer salaries are probably under $50k in the UK

For top-notch security developers, I call bullshit. Signal would be worthless if it started offshoring development to nickel and dime.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#299

Post by AYBABTME »

munk-a wrote: post #195
cmiles74 wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Messages inflexible reliance on SMS for communication to non-Apple devices is definitely an Apple issue, in my opinion. Apple has made it clear that they continue to default to SMS for non-iPhone communication solely because it's unpleasant for everyone involved.

There's apparently even "green bubble bullying"[1] of kids who have Android devices and thus have their messages appear different. In this particular way Apple is happy compromising the mental health of young people to secure a larger market share - it's awful and they deserve a lot more negative PR for it. 1. https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-apples-imessage-is-winning-...

> Apple is happy compromising the mental health of young people

Dramatic exaggeration and attribution of evil intent is counterproductive and disingenuous.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#300

Post by vlovich123 »

I feel like investing in p2p approaches and having people donate spare server capacity might be better. For example, relay calling was p2p in the original Skype and worked well. Apple private relay is a similar concept whereby there are two intermediaries to make things private. It gets trickier since in mobile land you can’t run servers really, but I feel like the Signal population has enough spare capacity to offload bandwidth and stuff and could be an easier sell than “please give us money”.

For the sms verification, I feel like forcing the requester to do some bitcoin mining for you could potentially pay for itself.

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