Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

signal.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

541–550 of 965 posts

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#541

Post by JohnFen »

karaterobot wrote: post #488
mhh__ wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that including staff + trying to do new stuff or just the servers.

It includes staff, but not new stuff. The new stuff seems to be mostly things not directly related to Wikipedia, like funding third-party projects or causes. I'm trying to be politic here: many people don't like the projects they are funding with donation money, and others just don't like that they give money to any projects, and other people don't like that they keep the banner up after they've paid for salaries and…

And others, like me, resent any hard-sell tactic and won't give money to anybody using them.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#542

Post by illiac786 »

vizzah wrote: post #523

$6 million per year on outgoing SMS? Do not send SMS to users, make users send SMS to you instead to confirm their numbers! I have this solution for years and it works >90% of the time. The rest 10% is calling a verification number which drops calls with busy signal (no fees for the caller) but sees who is calling and is able to verify their number.

Significantly less secure. Faking the sending number is much easier than hacking SS7 and getting SMS routed to you which are not destined to you (which is also doable but require an order of magnitude more skills and ressources in my view).

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#543

Post by walteweiss »

It’s so well written so long post, I afraid I well never read it as carefully. Tonight I’m too tired to delve into its depths. Tomorrow I won’t remember, possibly. And the day after that I won’t remember for sure.

Sorry everyone for this off-topic, I just think it’s needed to be addressed, but I have no idea what to do here.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#544

Post by [deleted] »

illiac786 wrote: post #542
vizzah wrote: post #523

$6 million per year on outgoing SMS? Do not send SMS to users, make users send SMS to you instead to confirm their numbers! I have this solution for years and it works >90% of the time. The rest 10% is calling a verification number which drops calls with busy signal (no fees for the caller) but sees who is calling and is able to verify their number.

Significantly less secure. Faking the sending number is much easier than hacking SS7 and getting SMS routed to you which are not destined to you (which is also doable but require an order of magnitude more skills and ressources in my view).

[deleted]

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#545

Post by illiac786 »

rglullis wrote: post #373
Canada wrote: 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?

Just don't use it, don't generate cost for them, don't be trapped by them. Everyone wins.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#547

Post by terminatornet »

appreciate their transparency, but boy do their devs make a lot of money. their 2 highest paid engineers make around $750k USD yearly. I guess if that's competitive good for them, I'm mostly jealous.

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

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#548

Post by DavidSJ »

Personally, I refuse to financially support Signal so long as they're still holding my chat logs hostage on my old iPhone and seem not at all concerned about solving this problem, which has existed for years.

There was (and still is, so far as I know) no upfront warning to users that if they don't first sync with a desktop client, and their phone gets lost or stolen, their iTunes backups do not (unlike most iPhone applications) contain their Signal chats. And furthermore, there's no way to export those chats in backup format from an old phone.

(You can transfer, but the transfer deletes the data from the original source, which is extremely foolish and dangerous IMO, and anyways isn't a proper export accessible from other applications. Furthermore, so far as I know there's no support for transferring from very old versions of the Signal client.)

This has been a critical bug for years [1], it's one of the most complained about issues, and Signal has done (and intends to do) absolutely nothing to fix it. It is absolutely unacceptable to have our own data held hostage by them in this way, especially without any upfront warning.

[1] https://community.signalusers.org/t/ios-backup-keeping-messa...

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#549

Post by rstuart4133 »

chefandy wrote: post #362
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.

I wish their justification for dropping SMS capability from their Android app to move away from phone numbers was a little more transparent about the obvious cost aspect rather than solely sticking to the patronizing "we're saving insecure messaging users from themselves" messaging they had. I found it pretty obnoxious. I think people generally get "valuable nonprofit + huge expense = not-sustainable = bad."

> their justification for dropping SMS capability from their Android app ... was a little more transparent about the obvious cost aspect

I'm not following. Signal gets stung for the registration SMS costs because they send the SMS to the user. They don't pay when one user sends an SMS to another user. If you send an SMS, you're the one who pays.

(I didn't realise they were moving away from phone numbers. Don't they they stay mandatory when PNP comes along?)

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#550

Post by XorNot »

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.

I'd pay substantially more for Signal if I could bot accounts.

I'd like a signal daemon on all my servers for alerting which could message me via Signal. This is worth a monthly fee to me.

I know people running small businesses who would really like to have a business Signal account: an ability to send Signal messages as a business identity without tying it to some specific phone number. This would be worth a subscription even if they had to get their customers to install Signal.

Signal need to figure out what product they sell that's going to fund the privacy objective: because there's plenty and they're worth having.

Post reply on HN