I’m using Signal, but after I found out that it’s not as privacy-friendly as it claims, I’m uneasy about sharing my address there. I trust the person who asked for my address, but not the service. What’s a safe way to share? I was thinking of something like a self-destructing pastebin, but surely you have better ideas.
Which of Signals privacy claims are false?
Pretty much everything about it is unverifiable, because its a centralized service and you ultimately don’t know what the server is running. Contrast that with self-hostable apps which must pass verifiability checks, because people can host their own instance.
Clients are open source. Independent clients exists and they work. So the server must kind of do what signal claims, otherwise those devs would notice.
You have no idea what the server is running. It has your phone number, ie your real name and address, and it knows who you sent messages to.
But it doesn’t though. That information has been subpoenaed from signal in the past. They don’t have access to it to give. This is public information.
As comment in thread points out, the subpoenaed info was essentially useless.
Yeah that’s exactly my point. Other guys was listing all these things the signal has stored but they really just don’t want access to any of it.
https://signal.org/blog/sealed-sender/
This is suspicion on the level of “you can’t be sure reality didn’t just pop into existence 10 seconds ago”. You can never be 100% sure of what others are doing on their hardware, or of anything really, especially if other people are involved. Your chat partners could leak all your chats and metadata for all you know!
What we do know is that Signal is operated by a non-profit foundation, their client and protocol are open source and considered the gold standard for privacy by pretty much every expert on the subject, they had multiple independent audits and a very good track record, they were subpoenaed and couldn’t comply because they didn’t have the requested data. That’s about as good as you can get.
Selfhost your own self destructing pastebin.
Just be sure to read every single line of code before you do. You don’t know what that selfhost solution which has 5k+ stars and dozens of forks is hiding.
Or just write one your own.
You should be using TailsOS the whole time. You know what? They’re scummy too. Just write your own OS.
You know what? Just don’t use computer. Use good ol paper and hand it to him.
Better use a cipher then for your pen and paper transmission. Invisible ink as well.