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Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

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Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#421

Post by rglullis »

BlueTemplar wrote: post #394
rglullis wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Not completely ? Their server seems to be open source too now (with the exception of the spam filter) ?

Can I operate my own Signal server and talk with people on the "main" one?

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#423

Post by toast0 »

bombcar wrote: post #258
dexwiz wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't send an sms yourself like you can an email. Instead of setting up a server, you have to work with a telco provider (an aggregator specifically). Any SMS service eventually hands off to one of these. Many SaaS SMS providers are just frontends for legacy telco services. They charge insane fees because they can, that is all there is to it. Sending mass email is still difficult. Its probably easier to pay a pro…

Maybe they should flip it on its head - get a thousand? Ten thousand? numbers that can accept SMS and tell people to "text 473843 to this number" to verify.

SMS sender isn't generally something you can trust. If you get the SMS directly from the carrier that's responsible for the number, and you have reason to trust their SMS sending to verify the sender, then yes. But in countries with number portability, you still need to pay to lookup the carrier responsible for a number.

And you'll need to maintain ingress numbers in all the countries you support, and maybe numbers per carrier, depending, and you'll need to tell the user the right number to text to ... it's a lot, and it might not work well or might not save much money.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#424

Post by heavyset_go »

jahabrewer wrote: post #383
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…

> Get off the major cloud providers that charge insane egress fees. And run their own DCs? Cool, they'll just need a lot of upfront capital aaaaaand they're back in the "need money" boat. Except more so.

There's a ton of options between paying premium cloud prices on egress and running your own data centers.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#425

Post by tamimio »

contact9879 wrote: post #380
tamimio wrote: post #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 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.

Right, so instead of 20 entities tracking you for example now you 18.. the false sense of privacy is far more dangerous than knowing your messages are not private (Like when Tucker Carlson used Signal thinking it was private to find later all his messages were not, regardless if it was a bugged app or an OS, the false sense of privacy is worse, he probably won’t texted those on iMessage for example). Same argument you can see with “vpn is private and we keep no logs because you can trust us!” plus it can be defeated with browser fingerprinting, or paying a hefty price for this “top private email” provider when the recipient doesn’t even use any privacy settings or anything let alone email as a protocol is not meant to be private, it’s all a business model, and the gullible buys it, you “have” to trust that Signal server is not backdoor-ed in real time, and as the old rule in security, if you can access the physical hardware you can in theory access anything in there, you don’t know the hardware is used there, is there any memory injection exploit that get activated after the so called audits? You can’t know, you have to trust that.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#426

Post by olah_1 »

lxgr wrote: post #194
olah_1 wrote: post #147

So charge everyone $2 per month to use it? shrug If you're not going to show how much money you get via donations, I'm not donating. I'm not going to donate more than you actually need, for example.

Their competitors are free. Charging $2 would make Signal a non-alternative for many of their users, and due to how the network effect works, it would greatly reduce the utility for everybody willing to pay as well. And that's all without even considering the significant overhead of collecting low-value payments internationally.

If you have a sustainable business model, you don't need the network effects. Threema is fine with a smaller userbase because they have a business model that works.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#427

Post by Ar-Curunir »

School-Cotton wrote: post #406
rasso wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except real privacy?

Why is it more private than WhatsApp?

I encourage you to read the article, but Signal minimizes the metadata it stores about you, doesn't hold on to you contact list, doesn't keep information about your IP address, etc.

WhatsApp instead makes tons of money from this kind of metadata.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#428

Post by NoGravitas »

rodlette wrote: post #86

I'd prefer a federated solution, but XMPP doesn't yet have decent support for group chat that doesn't depend on being connected. https://xmpp.org/extensions/attic/xep-0369-0.1.html is still experimental. Bravo to Signal for being easy enough for my family to use!

Matrix fixes that issue (and also the issue of the server your group chat is hosted on disappearing). It has plenty of other issues, of course.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#429

Post by wkat4242 »

OoooooooO wrote: post #419
sam_lowry_ wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not even that, because it is linked to phone numbers.

Afaik you can crrate an account without a number.

No. You can just hide it from other users in group chats now (and perhaps 1:1, didn't yet check but you still need one to sign up)

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#430

Post by jeroenhd »

abdullahkhalids wrote: post #268
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/

Mastodon org + Mastodon.social also have costs of 0.6 EUR/year, though they have two orders of magnitude less users [1]. This is really what most social media costs. These rates are even payable by many in poorer countries. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38117385

With how much Mastodon.social tends to fall over when Twitter does something stupid (again), their rates are probably a bit too low for a more robust service like Signal.

Signal also intentionally doesn't store too much data, long term data costs will slowly grow over the years. I imagine for a bigger platform, costs can grow to multiples of the rates for Signal and smaller Mastodon servers.

€10 per year should be more than enough for most users, though, and it should be quite affordable for most countries.

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