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Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

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Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#331

Post by wolverine876 »

It's amazing what they produce with their headcount:

First, we have three distinct client teams, one for each platform (Android, Desktop, and iOS). These teams are constantly working: adjusting to operating system updates, building new features, and making sure the app works on a wide variety of devices and hardware configurations. We also have dedicated engineering teams that handle the development and maintenance of the Signal Server and all of its infrastructure, our calling libraries like RingRTC, and core libraries like libsignal. These also need constant development and monitoring.

Product and design teams help shape the future of the app and determine how it will look and function, while our localization team coordinates translation efforts across more than sixty languages. We even have a full-time, in-house support group that interfaces with people who use Signal and provides detailed technical feedback and real-time troubleshooting information to every other team. This is an essential function, particularly at Signal, because we don’t collect analytics or telemetry data about how people are using Signal.

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How many people does it take to perform all that?

In total, around 50 full-time employees currently work on Signal ...

!

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#332

Post by dexwiz »

rezonant wrote: post #306
dexwiz wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't send an sms yourself like you can an email. Instead of setting up a server, you have to work with a telco provider (an aggregator specifically). Any SMS service eventually hands off to one of these. Many SaaS SMS providers are just frontends for legacy telco services. They charge insane fees because they can, that is all there is to it. Sending mass email is still difficult. Its probably easier to pay a pro…

> Many SaaS SMS providers are just frontends for legacy telco services. I worked on an automated SMS marketing system back in the day so I have seen this in action, at scale. This would be stuff like "text LAKERS to 12345 for Lakers updates"- we didn't handle the Lakers but we did handle many sports teams. Though I wasn't privvy to the financial side, I got the sense that the per-text cost ended up being manageable a…

Yeah, aggregator is a very industry specific term, so I just merged into teclo provider. But yeah, all the issues with short codes, national laws, and reputation, makes it very complex. I worked at a company like Twillio that had contracts with different aggregators across the world, and sold a platform to manage SMS interactions. They added a layer to make ensure customers respected opt-out keywords, or opt-in for specific countries, so it would help manage TCPA (and other) violations. I imagine this helped keep costs down. We would definitely fire customers for trying to get around the safeguards.

I was on the support side, so I just saw when it went wrong, which was a lot.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#334

Post by pierat »

alternatex wrote: post #291
pierat wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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#.

They want the address book because if you don't have engagement promotion features like that, there is no way to ever become remotely popular in the chat app space. Why is the security a joke? The data is e2e encrypted, and isn't related to a phone number in any way after registration. Do you know of a better way of combining privacy and anti-abuse measures? If you don't offload identity checks to telecom providers d…

> They want the address book because if you don't have engagement promotion features like that, there is no way to ever become remotely popular in the chat app space.

Intentionally ignoring the fact that Signal splatters your phone number to everyone else is a humongous problem. And you can even put your phone number block in your address book, and it'll tell you everyone who has Signal. This happens all the time, with Signal servers leaking all of this metadata.

And doing "engagement promotion" is what companies do to sell more shit. So, exactly what are they "selling"?

>Why is the security a joke?

Metadata, pertaining to communication patters and to whom matters just as much as what's being said.

And that metadata, like "your phone number" and "contact's phone number", and "when data is being sent to/from" is that metadata.

> The data is e2e encrypted,

> and isn't related to a phone number in any way after registration.

Bullshit. I see new people hopping on signal fairly regularly. If that was true, it'd be a simple verify-once-and-delete. It aint.

> Do you know of a better way of combining privacy and anti-abuse measures?

I reject your claim of "privacy", with regards to metadata.

Secondly, Tox has an alternate way to handle this, by allowing any number of accounts not tied to anything. Sure, it's a SHA256 id, but who cares. There, its secure AND anonymous.

Basically, I look at Signal as "better than SMS, but not much". It's basically a way to keep the phone company from scanning messages.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#335

Post by lxgr »

DANmode wrote: post #312
troupo wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Oh, right, it's called RCS and Apple refuses to support it. No one wants to support it. Even telecoms don't want to support it.

Telecoms don't even want to roll out all of the infrastructure they get paid by the government to, I don't know that their willingness to do anything is a point I'd try to stand firmly on.

Exactly, so how on earth does Google think that it is a good idea to put them in charge of running the infrastructure powering the future of instant messaging?

Any chance at all it has something to do with the fact that they've acquired an RCS infrastructure provider that they can sell to telcos?

https://jibe.google.com/

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#336

Post by [deleted] »

wolverine876 wrote: post #331

It's amazing what they produce with their headcount: First, we have three distinct client teams, one for each platform (Android, Desktop, and iOS). These teams are constantly working: adjusting to operating system updates, building new features, and making sure the app works on a wide variety of devices and hardware configurations. We also have dedicated engineering teams that handle the development and maintenance o…

[deleted]

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#337

Post by fmajid »

munk-a wrote: post #33
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.

SMS rates are absolutely bonkers considering the technical way they're transmitted. The US is an outlier in SMS rates actually being reasonable (usually unlimited or close to) for consumers - but for the rest of the world the insane mark up on that communication method has mostly obsoleted it... That'd be all well and good... the technology would die naturally, but all my American relatives continue to stubbornly use…

Just because consumers get unlimited SMS doesn’t mean businesses get that. The telcos are ruthless about extracting their pound of flesh at business rates.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#338

Post by yetanotherloss »

OfSanguineFire wrote: post #77
yetanotherloss wrote: post #42

Who is the active user base for signal these days? Everyone I knew who was using it dropped off after the SMS debacle, which was a shame. Edit: Wow some weird haters on HN today. I was honestly curious as an active signal user that was no longer able to use it to message people in North America and had never seen anyone using it in East Asia. Apparently this makes some other signal users very angry.

I've been to a lot of meetups in the last year and exchanged contacts with people. As a nerdy idealist running a deGoogled Android with no proprietary software, I always have to tell them that I don’t have WhatsApp, just Signal. Again and again I have heard the reply, “Oh, yeah, I’ve got Signal, I use it to buy drugs.” So, that’s some of the active user base in my city, but none of those users are very motivated to u…

That's been similar to my experience in the last year. WhatsApp or even worse, Snapchat, seems to be the preferred "private" messaging platforms, which is depressing to say the least.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#339

Post by vore »

hutzlibu wrote: post #273
vore wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- That's $338k/head on average. At face value for a nonprofit, I'd like these costs broke down as this seems excessive. There is far cheaper IT labor available outside SV. You get what you pay for, though. $338k/year seems like a reasonable salary for people working on something as privacy critical as Signal – just because you're working for a nonprofit doesn't mean you have to work for less competitive wages.

"just because you're working for a nonprofit doesn't mean you have to work for less competitive wages" Actually it does usually. Because when people see real meaning in their work, as opposed to find yet another way to manipulate people on other peoples behalf, then you don't have to buy their consciousness as well. So sure, it is awesome, that signals employers get to have meaning and money. But I would bet, you wou…

Why shouldn't we want to pay people working at non-profits the same for their labor than they would get at for-profits? If they are doing just as or even more important work, why do we want to bend over backwards to justify them getting paid less for it?

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#340

Post by AnonHP »

bongripper wrote: post #170
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.

Signal already has a very hard time competing against the network effects of WhatsApp and Telegram and getting people on the app, a fee would only increase that. But making it n$/year but with the option for an account withiot a phone number like other people are suggesting sounds nice, peace

> Signal already has a very hard time competing against the network effects of WhatsApp and Telegram

May not be the best thread to say this in, but Signal isn’t as good as Telegram and WhatsApp on features. People can be persuaded to switch, but may have different expectations than what Signal can satisfy.

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