Hey Folks! Someone in my family (Person A), has talked to a guy, who is working in the tech world, about if it make sense to use Signal, over Messenger, Snap, WhatsApp, with privacy in mind. The tech guy said, there is no difference, and that its not making sense to use it and that its almost the same. I know Signal is discussed alot here, but im now looking for some arguments, and facts to tell the one from my family, that the tech guy is wrong. What arguments can i use, why is Signal better in privacy, then the other alternatives? Person A, has always been sceptical about me beeing so privacy minded, and A thinks that there is nothing to do to protect, and is one of thoese saying : I have nothing to hide.
Edit: thank you for the help
I don’t think there’s much of a point unless person A actually wants to make a change in their habits. It’s like trying to convince someone to switch to Linux.
Both easy, backdoor them with the idea.
I managed to convince my family to switch by pointing out that the FBI and CISA both recommended switching to E2EE apps due to ongoing telecom hacks.
Sometimes, reality is enough to scare people into change.
I convinced my family to switch by giving them my Signal contact info and letting them know that that’s where they could contact me. I ditched my WhatsApp account when Facebook bought them, and never had any of the other accounts because I knew too much about the people behind the companies.
A don’t wanna change mind, A always wanna be right, so I have to have the best arguments, not to make person a to switch, but to “win” the discussion 🙂
Send them both a bunch of videos from Naomi Brockwell (NBTV). Or buy them each a copy of her book
@FriedRice@lemmy.ml Do you still require help?
Here’s my main argument for more private services (I try to make all my arguments short).
According to a study done by proton, a single company makes a minimum of $200 dollars off of each person, each year. Of course, they probably gain more money via clandestine deals or the government buying data directly to get around the 4th amendment.
But that money, doesn’t go solely to the companies dedicated to collecting data, or those parts of other companies. It goes to lobbying the government to strip away privacy further.
And then I have two endings, depending on the situation:
-
Of course, I recognize that in today’s connected world, I can’t get privacy unless I go live in the woods. But I can decrease the amount of money companies make off my data, which I do like.
-
Organizations like the EFF, lobby on the other side, for more privacy for us. But they are opposed by when massive companies like google also lobby. So when I deny google $100, that’s money they can’t use to lobby anymore. Rather than thinking of it as denying google money, think of it as making a donation to the EFF, that they use to ensure our rights are in place.
-
Variants of this exact question seem to be asked at the rate of about 3 per week.
Here are 28 arguments for you to use.
These are not designed to penetrate disinformation.
that’s a lot of arguments
Just check news, Paragon case in Italy or other past security scandal.
show them a picture of zuckersuckers face and ask if they would trust him with your secrets
Signal is the only app on that list whose app is open source. That means it can be audited to see if they are telling the truth.
You cannot say the same for the others and you just have to take them at their word. Should we take Facebook at their word?
It’s also the only app on the list managed by a 501©3 non-profit, so you can additionally check where their money goes.
That’s true! I can’t wait to “shoot” back with arguments :-)
Also the FBI took signal to court and the only data they could provide was the date of signup and last login timestamp
This is an important extra point: being open source, a government can’t secretly mandate a back door, because everyone would be able to see it. For the other options listed, there are no guarantees.
They can put the backdoor in themselves though, see the recent xz backdoor. But the question is whether it would be found out or not.
xz backdoor rely on two testfile with malware, some script that do specific thing to malware to unmask and inject. If commit later change any part to break backdoor, signal probably forced to reject to keep backdoor.
But why reject good change? Might raise red flag.
xz almost worked because it was in something nobody was looking at. Signal code is audited regularly.
For the purposes of the average person the tech guy in your op is absolutely 100% correct.
All the platforms listed use transport encryption and that’s enough to avoid mitm surveillance which is enough for most people.
Most people’s “threat model” is the police or a pi. All the apps listed including signal have to comply with orders from American police and have “sidechain attacks” that involve stuff like getting some member of the groupchat’s device and scrolling up or tricking someone into giving up sensitive information.
WhatsApp tracks when and who you talk with.
Thar information is used to put people on government target lists and kill them.
WhatsApp fails to include a libre software licence text file. We do not control it, anti-libre software.
I think that this is a pretty good reason.
If the billionaires are using it for privacy, then it is likely the best one.
I mean, how much do you wanna bet that they all had a private dinner with the other billionaires that own other apps and had a private conversation about whether their messages are actually private and able to be hid from the government?
Whats’ app, while E2EE can still pull lots of information from who you message, how often, the size of the messages, and contact’s phone number. Messenger has the content of your messages and with whom you converse according to Facebook account info stored on Facebook servers. Snapchat has a record of all activity, contacts, and message content. The messages only disappear from app but not from SnapChat servers. All 3 of those record of how you live your life, except Whatsapp can’t see content of messages but still has your activities and contact phone numbers.
Signal was ordered to turn over user content to court and Signal only had when the user last connected to the service and date of account creation. Signal had zero information about messages, when messages were sent, or to whom.
Signal is the best alternative to Meta messaging apps and to Snapchat for normies.
