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

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#191

Post by pierat » Thu, Nov 16, 2023, 5:24 PM UTC

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#.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#192

Post by renonce » Thu, Nov 16, 2023, 5:24 PM UTC

lxgr wrote: post #141

nvrmnd wrote: post #80

I donate to signal, and use it frequently. But I would much prefer for the app to simply charge users rather than beg for donations. Even better would be to charge users in a way that reflects the costs. For instance, maybe verifying a new number over SMS should cost $0.10 if that's going to make up 14% of the operating costs. Begging for donations to subsidize excessive use by other users just doesn't seem sustainab…

How are you going to charge users $0.10? Micropayments is a huge unsolved problem.

Buy 50 invite codes for $5

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#193

Post by nvy » Thu, Nov 16, 2023, 5:24 PM UTC

rogerkirkness wrote: post #40

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/

Based on App Store downloads on both platforms, they are well over 200M at this point.

A lot of people, myself included, have it installed but never use it after they dropped SMS support.

Only a tiny fraction of my contacts use Signal, and most of those are also on Whatsapp, Telegram, Discord, and others.

Signal offers essentially nothing to me.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#194

Post by lxgr » Thu, Nov 16, 2023, 5:24 PM UTC

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.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#195

Post by munk-a » Thu, Nov 16, 2023, 5:24 PM UTC

cmiles74 wrote: post #168

lxgr wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, I see what you mean. That's not what I'd call iMessage though, that's just SMS: The iOS application is called "Messages"; iMessage is the over-the-top Apple-exclusive messaging service.

Messages inflexible reliance on SMS for communication to non-Apple devices is definitely an Apple issue, in my opinion. Apple has made it clear that they continue to default to SMS for non-iPhone communication solely because it's unpleasant for everyone involved.

There's apparently even "green bubble bullying"[1] of kids who have Android devices and thus have their messages appear different. In this particular way Apple is happy compromising the mental health of young people to secure a larger market share - it's awful and they deserve a lot more negative PR for it.

1. https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-apples-imessage-is-winning-...

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#196

Post by cloogshicer » Thu, Nov 16, 2023, 5:24 PM UTC

Night_Thastus wrote: post #19

I've loved Signal. It's been the only consistent way I've been able to send and receive high-quality pictures and videos at all. It's been the only way I've been reliably able to send texts when I'm in an area with poor reception, which is frequent. The privacy is nice and it's been simple and easy to use. I hope they stick around. Everyone likes to bash more privacy oriented companies if they aren't absolutely 100%…

I know it's unpopular to say this on here but Signal will never be popular as long as they don't add basic features that all other messaging apps have.

- If you lose your phone or it no longer boots, all your messages are irretrievably lost. There's no way to create backups on iOS. Why the hell can't I enable iCloud backups? I know it breaks privacy in some ways but let me choose the trade off. Put a giant warning if you have to.

- The desktop app is awful and requires signing in again all the time. See the Telegram Desktop app for how to do it better. In my opinion it should be the gold standard for desktop messaging apps

- Desktop app keeps losing message history

As long as Signal treats all messages as if they're so important that even super spies should not be able to read them, and as a result, goofing usability in a way that standard features don't work, I 100% understand that the majority of people won't use it.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#197

Post by mmanfrin » Thu, Nov 16, 2023, 5:25 PM UTC

nvrmnd wrote: post #80

I donate to signal, and use it frequently. But I would much prefer for the app to simply charge users rather than beg for donations. Even better would be to charge users in a way that reflects the costs. For instance, maybe verifying a new number over SMS should cost $0.10 if that's going to make up 14% of the operating costs. Begging for donations to subsidize excessive use by other users just doesn't seem sustainab…

> I donate to signal, and use it frequently. But I would much prefer for the app to simply charge users rather than beg for donations.

Hard disagree. If you charge, the number of people who will use it shrinks by several magnitudes, and then you lose your network effect, you lose the ability to get your less technically inclined friends to install it.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#198

Post by FalconSensei » Thu, Nov 16, 2023, 5:25 PM UTC

irrational wrote: post #174

zamalek wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The phone number requirement is why WhatsApp won the space over in the first place. There were loads of username+password-based services before it, but none reached the market it did. Why? An incredibly wide user funnel, singing up is frictionless. You might understand that it's a bad idea, but that makes you an outlier.

What did WhatsApp win? I've never used it, so I'm not sure what anyone uses it for.

In South America it's the standard messaging everyone uses, even businesses. No one uses SMS

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#199

Post by jonfw » Thu, Nov 16, 2023, 5:25 PM UTC

MuffinFlavored wrote: post #23

If you really wanted to talk to somebody in a "non-decryptable" fashion, could you set up like a channel that encrypts itself with a ton of different encryption methods, keys, etc. (encrypted payloads inside each other) Signal encryption is its main feature (I think) and how easy it makes it (abstracts handling key transfer and all that), I'm just trying to think through... if I wanted nobody to read what I was sayin…

I think the biggest risks for most people are going to be around key management, social engineering, and exploitation of terminal devices (i.e. if somebody has compromised your device running signal and can observe the message before encryption or after decryption).

More layers of encryption doesn't really solve those problems.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#200

Post by superseeplus » Thu, Nov 16, 2023, 5:25 PM UTC

While I would be willing to pay a fee to use Signal, most people won’t and then Signal would turn into a deserted landscape full of privacy nerds who only talk with each other. On the other hand, being better at soliciting donations more often would be more helpful. I’m a regular Signal user and didn’t even know I could donate.