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Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

signal.org

371–380 of 965 posts

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#371

Has anyone tried setting up their own Signal server? Be cool to do this, and then give all your friends the ip for truly private messaging. https://github.com/signalapp Seems like all their stuff is open source.

Offering self-hosted servers would probably just degrade the security guarantees of Signal if people misconfigure them. Doesn't seem to be worthwhile for the Signal foundation to run into this risk of undermining their own reputation for a niche user base who cares about self-hosting.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#372
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we can rent server infrastructure from a variety of providers like Amazon AWS, Google Compute Engine, Microsoft Azure Moving off cloud services to lower-cost provider like Hetzner, Vultr and DigitalOcean might provide a lot of cost savings. I also imagine they're using managed SMS services from one of these clouds, and moving off them to a combination of local SMS gateways in each country can also further reduce co…

Any idea what prevents Signal from using cheaper alternatives? Edit: I meant moving off cloud to Hetzner, Vultr, DigitalOcean.

In business, you get what you pay for. Cheaper hosting might raise more issues that need to by handled by your employees, who also are expensive, and also the organization's focus gets disrupted. The hosting company / cloud vendor has an enormous economic advantage, with access to the entire hardware and software stack, the engineers who built it, people whose full-time job is operating it. Often it's cheaper to pay more for better.

As I have to explain about open source, 'Free is only free if your time is worth nothing.' (And I use a lot of FOSS, it just not always the solution.)

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#373
post #88

Seriously consider setting up a recurring donation if you prefer Signal. They have delivered consistently over the years. I set the $20/month back when they introduced the option. I'm curious what the breakdown of donations is. I only have 1 contact with a $10/month and 1 with a $5/month badge. Of course there could be others not displaying the badge. Signal really needs 500,000 people giving $20/month and plus the r…

I fail to understand the point of supporting an organization that is completely against self-sovereignty like Signal is. Why would I want to pay someone to develop something that traps me into their platform and does not offer a way out?

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#374

Some of these things raise an eyebrow and I'd like them further broken down (but in the mean time, I'm still donating): * $19 million for 50 staff - 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. * 20 petabytes per year of bandwidth, or 20 million gigabytes, to enable voice and video calling alon…

How about they pull their socks up and use peer to peer technology instead? Messages are asynchronous so they need to be temporarily stored but routing real-time audio and video is a technology problem that they have chosen the expensive way to solve.

They are peer-to-peer by default between people in their contacts list. That is for when calling someone that isn't in your contacts list or for people that have enabled the relay all calls option.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#375
>Privacy

That’s a very bold statement from an app that still requires a phone number using a broken protocol (gsm) to “verify” your identity and authenticate it, sim swap attacks can be carried out by kids these days. Also, don’t expect privacy when you are using a proprietary OS like iOS or one full of Google services that also have proprietary firmware drivers, they (the adversaries) don’t need to even decrypt these “privacy apps” when it’s easier to access the backdoor-ed OS or hardware, but enjoy the illusion in the meantime.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#376
post #88

Seriously consider setting up a recurring donation if you prefer Signal. They have delivered consistently over the years. I set the $20/month back when they introduced the option. I'm curious what the breakdown of donations is. I only have 1 contact with a $10/month and 1 with a $5/month badge. Of course there could be others not displaying the badge. Signal really needs 500,000 people giving $20/month and plus the r…

20/month for every chat service I use is very steep. I'd be spending more on chat services than on mobile data + unlimited calling + landline + DSL + streaming services combined!

They actual costs are apparently about 1 USD per year per user. I usually at least double (usually more) my incurred cost when the donation is optional, to cover for those who can't or won't pay, but paying 240× the cost price seems wasteful as well when there are other nonprofits that can do more good with every dollar you give them (be it solving poverty, climate change, whatever you find valuable) rather than one which has mostly fixed fees

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#377
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/

Whatsapp got pretty big at 1 eur/year (iOS) and 1 eur for lifetime (Android) here in the netherlands.

I do fear they'll loose most tech un-savvy users because they don't know how to pay (safely).

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#378
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/

It’s beginning to sound like the 1 EUR/year that at some point WhatsApp wanted to charge and it seemed reasonable to me at the time. Signal is even better and even more so justified.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#379
post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Based on App Store downloads on both platforms, they are well over 200M at this point.

A lot of people, myself included, have it installed but never use it after they dropped SMS support. Only a tiny fraction of my contacts use Signal, and most of those are also on Whatsapp, Telegram, Discord, and others. Signal offers essentially nothing to me.

The sms decision made signal go from THE messaging app on my phone to an app I only use with a very small subset of my contacts. It is infuriating that they didn't allow users to retain that functionality when it costs them nothing, and they could have disabled it by default.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#380

>Privacy That’s a very bold statement from an app that still requires a phone number using a broken protocol (gsm) to “verify” your identity and authenticate it, sim swap attacks can be carried out by kids these days. Also, don’t expect privacy when you are using a proprietary OS like iOS or one full of Google services that also have proprietary firmware drivers, they (the adversaries) don’t need to even decrypt thes…

I'm always intrigued by people that have this POV. Security and privacy are not binary for fucks sake. Improvement on the status quo is great and Signal improves a hell of a lot.

Not to mention that half of your comment is non-issues.

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