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Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

signal.org

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Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#561

Post by pizzafeelsright »

caeril wrote: post #489
sneak wrote: post #456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Phone numbers can be obtained anonymously in many countries. I have several anonymous Signal accounts, each with their own anonymous phone number.

It's possible in the US, but it's getting very difficult. I don't know anywhere you can buy or or borrow a DID with Monero anymore. Looks like they got to Telnum recently. You can still buy a SIM, a prepaid PIN, and a phone with cash, but you'd need to pay a non-correlated person to be seen on CCTV to do it, at a non-correlated time, and hope they don't just take your money and leave you nothing at the dead drop. The…

Why are you typing my comments?

Exactly. They won't because .... reasons.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#562

Post by rglullis »

danielheath wrote: post #502
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?

Given how many activists have used it in overthrowing dictatorial governments, self-sovereignty seems an odd choice of words to claim it doesn’t support.

Perhaps it was a bad choice of words. What I mean is that they say "you don't need to trust us", yet they require you to run through them. They refuse to build their system in a decentralized way, and the more that time goes by the more the decentralized alternatives are showing they are as secure as Signal without forcing us to accept their restrictions like mandatory use of phone numbers for authentication.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#563

Post by jenny91 »

XorNot wrote: post #550
leptons wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 subscri…

If you want one for just personal use; this works well: https://github.com/AsamK/signal-cli

Just sign up with a Twilio number (using voice call) and you can make your own bot.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#564

Post by rglullis »

illiac786 wrote: post #545
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?

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

The 50 million using them all lose because they are locked into a monopolistic platform.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#565

Post by johndoe18637 »

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.

It would be great if Signal wouldn't require a phone number for account setup at all

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#566

Post by nani8ot »

urig wrote: post #387
hiatus wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You paid them nothing and are infuriated. Interesting.

Many people care about Signal, and it is okay to dislike their decision. OP didn't demand from Signal to support SMS, but they expressed their emotions about the change.

Signal is an awesome project but some of their decisions annoy many users. E.g. Signal does not allow to automatically save all pictures in the gallery. It's a privacy feature, but it's inconvenient since it forces me remember to download each image seperately.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#567

Post by illiac786 »

rglullis wrote: post #564
illiac786 wrote: post #545

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The 50 million using them all lose because they are locked into a monopolistic platform.

they can communicate to anyone with WhatsApp, SMS, iMessage.... This is a closed system, not a monopoly.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#569

Post by illiac786 »

johndoe18637 wrote: post #565
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.

It would be great if Signal wouldn't require a phone number for account setup at all

this is in testing and coming to you early next year.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#570

Post by starttoaster »

wpietri wrote: post #493
_Algernon_ wrote: post #461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why should Wikipedia do new stuff? Or rather, why is it okay for Wikipedia to lie to people to get funding for their new pet projects?

> Why should Wikipedia do new stuff? Because it's not perfect yet? The point of Wikipedia is not to have some servers ticking over. The project has a vision: "Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge." I agree it's not ok for them to lie, and am bothered enough by their dubious fundraising tactics that I stopped donating. But that's a totally separate concern than…

What is the mission for Wikipedia beyond doing what they already do, which is just hosting the largest internet encyclopedia? Purely curious because I thought Wikipedia was pretty much at its end game for what it wants to accomplish that is the job of the organization rather than the job of all of its volunteers.
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