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Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

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Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#431

Post by autoexec »

Night_Thastus wrote: post #409
autoexec wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Everyone likes to bash more privacy oriented companies if they aren't absolutely 100% perfect in every single way, but IMO perfect is the enemy of good and Signal has been very good. Signal has not been good. The absolute least we should expect from any "privacy oriented company" is that they're honest and fully transparent about the data they collect and store, and Signal is none of that. Since they started collec…

Every single time I've seen Signal asked for data in a court case, they've basically handed back a unix timestamp of when the account was created and said "that's all we have". Or it was last access time, I could have misremembered. Either way, that seems quite good to me.

You're right, that's how it used to be. They still have pages on their website bragging about times when they didn't have anything to turn over because they didn't keep any of it. A while ago that all changed. They started collecting and forever storing in the cloud the exact data those requests were asking for. Lists of everyone you've been contacting, along with your profile data (name, phone number, photo).

https://community.signalusers.org/t/proper-secure-value-secu...

If you're a Signal user and this is the first time you're hearing about this, that should tell you everything you need to know about how trustworthy Signal is.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#432

Post by contact9879 »

dingnuts wrote: post #403
contact9879 wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

there's a big social cost to trying to get others to use Signal, and it's not worth it if the advertised features don't work as advertised.. that said I stopped using Signal years ago because of basic deliverability being less reliable than SMS.. I switched back to SMS so I could communicate reliably with a loved one during an emergency when Signal randomly stopped letting me respond to messages, and I won't pay the…

I understand that. Signal has put in a lot of work since I started using it fulltime and is much more reliable now than it was just 2-4 years ago. The only time I've had issues now is when I'm backpacking in areas with spotty connection. SMS delivers quicker and is more reliable.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#433

Post by godelski »

akprasad wrote: post #255

I just donated $10 to Signal. Here's how to do so on iPhone in less than a minute: 1. Open Signal and click on your user icon in the upper left. 2. Go to "Settings" --> "Donate to Signal". 3. Click "Donate", select your donation options, and pay with Apple Pay.

Also a reminder, your work might have a donation matching system. All the major tech companies do, so you can really boost your effect.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#434

Post by zucker42 »

jzb wrote: post #382

I'll probably donate, but I find it annoying that Signal only offers Linux packages for Debian-based distros. I've had headaches with the Flatpak. I would think that the Linux desktop audience - while not huge - would be the most interested in Signal. That is, might not be a lot of Linux users but percentage-wise I'd bet more Linux users are interested in Signal than macOS or Windows users. Even an AppImage would be…

Signal Desktop is available in the Arch repositories. https://archlinux.org/packages/extra/x86_64/signal-desktop/

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#435

Post by wkat4242 »

godelski wrote: post #356
2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Definitely reasonable but the ultra privacy-conscious/paranoid can't easily donate or pay privately.

They take checks by mail. You definitely can do a cashier's check and I'm sure they'd take the "cash in an envelope" method that places like Mullvad do too. Looks like they also support crypto, and that includes Zcash. So I don't think this is a great excuse. The only "can't easily donate" aspect is going to also be tied with the "can't easily get a cashier's check or find an anonymous person to sell me bitcoin for c…

How is a check in any way private? Your name is on it.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#436

Post by eviks »

lxgr wrote: post #360
eviks wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can also charge for a 10 year minimum and get to a higher retained % You don't need to provide support, even much more expensive consumer services live without a proper one, so being explicit about the fact that you only pay for infrastructure could suffice Not sure why payment privacy has to be so strict for everyone The network effect damage is real, but maybe it could be limited with donations :)

Selling a service automatically opts you in to all kinds of consumer protections, either legally or de facto through the dispute mechanism of the payment methods your customers use. Just ignoring customer complaints and selling the service "as-is" is usually not an option.

Why is it not an option when it already exists in many places (all these protections fail all the time)? Your first sentence doesn't imply high/expensive level of customer service

Besides, even now they're not ignoring all the complaints, the do fix bugs?

Maybe to be more specific, how much did it cost WhatsApp when they had $1 price and a tiny team? How does it compare to the cost of SMS?

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#437

Post by Aachen »

Rastonbury wrote: post #158
Aissen wrote: post #97

The cloud tax is crazy (especially bandwidth). Pretty sure Signal has reached the scale where they would be cheaper by building their infra, maybe starting with the most expensive (storage + bandwidth), and then doing others. SMS is (unfortunately) core to the product, so I'm not certain how they could make it cheaper, while retaining the same properties (user+pass registration would be a nightmare for spam and chang…

Anyone know much does it become worth it to build your own? They spend around $3-4m on storage and bandwidth

> millions upon millions of new people suddenly switched to Signal in January 2021 after WhatsApp updated their Terms of Service

From a footnote of the article. Maybe this is why they've stayed with "infinite scale, infinite costs" (commonly known as "cloud") so long? Surely at some point this is worth considering though, I would also be curious where that point lies

Virtually anyone, also when spending only 100 euros/month on server providers, can save a large percentage of costs by taking it in-house. There might be a gap where you need dedicated personnel and it's briefly cheaper to outsource before you grow and it inverts again, but generally if you've got a stable service then this is nearly always worth it

Maybe a hybrid, where new users onboard onto cloud and they buy hardware for expected loads (i.e. current users), would be the most cost effective. I wonder how hard that is to combine the two worlds, but anything that requires more than one server already has that sort of communication going on so there shouldn't be any real blockers. Maybe the two types of infra add costs/risks again and that's why one rarely sees this setup?

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#438

Post by Ar-Curunir »

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#.

Signal doesn't learn your contact list. See https://signal.org/blog/private-contact-discovery/ and https://signal.org/blog/building-faster-oram/

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#439

Post by lxgr »

olah_1 wrote: post #426
lxgr wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, but Signal and Threema seem to have a pretty different mission.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#440

Post by contact9879 »

tamimio wrote: post #425
contact9879 wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 yo…

I'm honestly interested in what your solution for private communication is that will also get mass adoption among hundreds of millions of users. (And it's definitely not running your own XMPP server and getting everyone to switch to Linux phones).
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