Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive • Hacker News Board

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#731

Post by jtakkala » Fri, Nov 17, 2023, 5:04 AM UTC

gamblor956 wrote: post #669

contact9879 wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They cover this pretty substantially in the post on Signal's website (I know they merged the Wired article into this one). Signal is trying to compete with the richest companies in the world; including for talent. And considering Signal's origins and motivations, they're not going to lower salaries or decrease benefits because some people believe that working for a non-profit automatically means lower compensation.

Engineers doing the same work on iMessage and Meta Messenger, i.e., their direct competitors, make less than 660k/annually in salary and benefits. This means that the pay packages are likely not based on comparable market wages, which is an actual legal requirement for highly compensated employees for U.S. charities.

$660k total comp (including benefits) is probably right in the median of what an e6 earns at Meta. I don’t know where you’re hearing otherwise.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#732

Post by illiac786 » Fri, Nov 17, 2023, 5:10 AM UTC

serial_dev wrote: post #591

novok wrote: post #585

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not about legitimacy but having a bootstrapped contact list to talk to along with other user friction reasons

In that case it doesn't make sense to make it required. Sure, I don't mind if they ask for my phone number if they think that's a better default onboarding flow, but allow users to bypass it. With all that said, I don't think it's really only about user friction.

they did not "make it required", Signal was just never developed to support anything else for username/registration. Which is what they have now almost corrected.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#733

Post by deanCommie » Fri, Nov 17, 2023, 5:13 AM UTC

charles_f wrote: post #494

wpietri wrote: post #487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Don't take them personally No. They are meant to manipulate me personally, as well as other persons I care about. I will take them personally. More broadly, I don't have to excuse bad behavior just because somebody's making money off it or because it makes some too-narrow metric go up. Yes, it's a complex and imperfect world. But to me that's a reason to work harder to make things better, not a reason for people to…

> They are meant to manipulate me personally, as well as other persons I care about. I will take them personally. This, absolutely! they play on people's psyche and mental cabling by trying to guilt you in the same way your parent would ; it's manipulative, and I have an absolute hatred for these tactics.

They're not your parent, and if you treat them as such, that's a problem you need to work on addressing.

Parental manipulation works because it's completely reasonable given the relationship for it to be effective. It's a betrayal of trust.

If a company tries that tactic and it "works" too well, that's an opportunity to evaluate your psyche, not get mad at them.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#734

Post by idle_zealot » Fri, Nov 17, 2023, 5:30 AM UTC

deanCommie wrote: post #733

charles_f wrote: post #494

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They are meant to manipulate me personally, as well as other persons I care about. I will take them personally. This, absolutely! they play on people's psyche and mental cabling by trying to guilt you in the same way your parent would ; it's manipulative, and I have an absolute hatred for these tactics.

They're not your parent, and if you treat them as such, that's a problem you need to work on addressing. Parental manipulation works because it's completely reasonable given the relationship for it to be effective. It's a betrayal of trust. If a company tries that tactic and it "works" too well, that's an opportunity to evaluate your psyche, not get mad at them.

Companies do it because it works. You're blaming bad behavior on the people that are being manipulated because, according to you, they have psychological problems. As if the people being manipulated being disabled somehow excuses the company taking advantage of them.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#735

Post by amluto » Fri, Nov 17, 2023, 5:31 AM UTC

toast0 wrote: post #499

peanut-walrus wrote: post #441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you require global connectivity, managing hundreds of carrier APIs, contracts, etc seems like major overhead. Also, there are companies whose only purpose for existing is providing messaging, like Twilio, are they just...not doing this or do the carriers just not play ball? In that case, why would the carriers agree to sell to you at a discount?

Aggregators do some of this, and they can negotiate pricing to some degree, but a carrier is unlikely to intentionally give them zero cost traffic, and even if they do, they're not going to pass that through at zero cost. I ran the engineering side of carrier integrations at WhatsApp. Carriers wanted to sell data plans with special pricing for data with WA and use WA branding in advertising, because it attracted cust…

Can you say what ordinary (non-discounted) pricing was like, per message? At least in the US, most carriers did I and, believe, still do operate free SMTP -> SMS gateways. They worked okay, although they resulted in oddly formatted messages.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#736

Post by android42 » Fri, Nov 17, 2023, 5:31 AM UTC

pushcx wrote: post #609

asymmetric wrote: post #587

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have held off donating to signal so far exactly because there is no clarity around this token, why it was even added to signal and who profited from that.

And they stopped updating the server code repo for a year, apparently to hide the launch of this token: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26725915 I don't think they ever confirmed that this was why they stopped updating, or did a postmortem on how poorly that launch went. I vaguely recall there was also an unexplained spike in MobileCoin trading shortly before the public launch that looked quite a bit like inside…

I for one will never donate to signal, and consider my $1000 (or $20k of never realized "fake" money, explained later) lost to mobilecoins to be my lifetime "donation" to them.

Short timeline of events from my side:

- Signal announces/endorses mobilecoin support, as their new and only cryptocurrency option

- I figure I'll get on it early this time after missing out on Bitcoin, despite Signal only supporting this in the UK (for now)

- Mobilecoin and Signal websites both mention FTX as being the only exchange where you can currently buy mobilecoin, never used it before but I go ahead, transfer $1000 worth (at the time) of bitcoin to buy mobilecoin

- There are currently no other wallets for mobilecoin (except maybe some difficult to use or obscure ones that looked sketchy? don't like leaving money on the exchange but didn't really have other options)

- Mobilecoin spiked on ftx, sold and bought back a few times, at the right time with some good luck, now have $20,000 of mobilecoin

- Signal finally adds support for mobilecoin in my country, proceed to try and withdraw it

- However, my country just announced legislation to require ID in order to buy/sell cryptocurrency, but it's not planned to go into effect for at least another 6 months or so, but FTX decided to start requiring it immediately and wouldn't let me withdraw without it (I could see they were still willing to take more deposits from me without it though!)

- FTX had trouble verifying ID, I already suspected what was about to happen, tried my best to get my crypto out but they kept having excuses, the ftx fall out and everything became known some months later

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#737

Post by c0pium » Fri, Nov 17, 2023, 5:37 AM UTC

Krasnol wrote: post #497

nurple wrote: post #477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess maybe I'm missing the purported point of signal, attaching your phone number to use it notwithstanding, but attaching payment identity to it as well? Like, what's the point of going through the pain required to use it?

Signal is not for anonymity. It's for security.

For some anonymity is security. Better to say it’s for message confidentiality.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#738

Post by activescott » Fri, Nov 17, 2023, 5:41 AM UTC

smarnach wrote: post #714

activescott wrote: post #673

I almost skipped reading into this article because I love Signal and it's mission (and their rare commitment to stick to it) and would have known it's good. Yet, the details on expenses and infrastructure was a good read. $1.3M/yr for temporary storage! $6M for verification codes during sign-up!? Toll fraud!? GOOG & FB data center spend, data breaches from GOOG, MSFT, et. al 50 full-time employees vs 3K or 4K for sim…

The link about the Google "data breach" appears to be about some tax companies being sued for using Google Analytics tracking pixels. Calling this a data breach may be a bit of a stretch.

Thanks. I hadn't dug into that link, but I did based on your comment. It is a Congressional investigation that is rooted on a report from The Markup [1] that, as you note isn't about an accidental breach by Google, but one where multiple companies send extensive PII to Google about site visitors. While not necessarily a "breach", I think this lead of personal data plays to Signal article's point though. The Markup article's git repo with HAR files of what was sent to Google was convincing.[2]

[1]: https://themarkup.org/pixel-hunt/2022/11/22/tax-filing-websi... [2]: https://github.com/the-markup/meta-pixel-taxes

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#739

Post by toast0 » Fri, Nov 17, 2023, 5:43 AM UTC

amluto wrote: post #735

toast0 wrote: post #499

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aggregators do some of this, and they can negotiate pricing to some degree, but a carrier is unlikely to intentionally give them zero cost traffic, and even if they do, they're not going to pass that through at zero cost. I ran the engineering side of carrier integrations at WhatsApp. Carriers wanted to sell data plans with special pricing for data with WA and use WA branding in advertising, because it attracted cust…

Can you say what ordinary (non-discounted) pricing was like, per message? At least in the US, most carriers did I and, believe, still do operate free SMTP -> SMS gateways. They worked okay, although they resulted in oddly formatted messages.

Twilio has a public price sheet[1], I think they haven't actually updated this one lately, but it's a good representation of what ordinary pricing is like. This is not an endorsement (or non-endorsement) of Twilio, but having a public price sheet makes it easy to link to them.

In general, pricing varies widely by destination (country and sometimes carrier), US and some other places are Those SMTP -> SMS gateways sometimes work in the US, but they don't work much in other countries, and they're not good enough to rely on if your product requires an SMS during the new user flow. SMS costs are real and it's frustrating, but if it costs too much, you need to use something other than phone numbers for ids; I don't think skirting by with email gateways is going to work. But, if you build dynamic routing, I guess you could try.

Also, you've got the use the right email gateway for the user's carrier, and a carrier lookup is on the order of $0.01, unless you have tons of volume, so for the US, you might as well pay for the SMS.

[1] https://assets.cdn.prod.twilio.com/pricing-csv/SMSPricing.cs...

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#740

Post by giancarlostoro » Fri, Nov 17, 2023, 5:48 AM UTC

charles_f wrote: post #279

You have to appreciate the complete transparency, gently nudging towards giving without ever begging for it. Refreshing compared to the alternative that Wikipedia is showing, with the tantrum-like emails we receive from their CEO like "LAST REMINDER" or "We've had enough" ; which they ironically send to people who gave.

There was a comic I've never been able to find about wikipedia asking for money, it basically had them being that one crazy dude yelling at you to donate, and getting worse as time passed and you tried to ignore them. Then it showed a raw screenshot of wikipedias nag screen. Unsure who drew it or where it went, but I regret not archiving it, because it conveys what it feels like every time. I just don't want to donate if I have 0 control of where my money goes. If it's straight to paying the bill for the infrastructure, then sure.