Wow, relying on Signal might actually be a Very Bad Idea™
In below longread there's a lot to unwind, but the essence is this: it is a state asset for American imperialism built on the infrastructure of Big Tech.
@collectifission@delta if you know how signal works, why is this a concern? The only bad thing in practice right now is that if amazons servers go down, signal goes down. The "surveillance/censorship" statements in the article feel ridiculous. Are we talking about the same Signal here?
it talks about signal capitulating to corporate and state interests, that it is a company with monetary incentives (not direct but elon musk, darpa etc etc)
its not saying that signal e2e is broken or that they can read your messages
but that it should not be the solution for activists and others and we should not have it as the end all of secure messaging
@zenmaya@collectifission@delta The article says a lot of things, but also seems to mislead on purpose, which is why I don't really trust it
For example: They make a big point about how the OTF was created as a cold-war propaganda outlet, which really doesn't say much by itself. Many things that are now properly useful tools in the essential digital toolkits of marginalized people around the globe have had their roots in some sort of imperialist government involvement, but that's not a reason to discredit the tool on its own. Tor is also such a project, for example, having its roots in the U.S. Naval Research Labs and the CIA; organizations, which both aren't... quite neutral in selecting a project to pursue, one could say /lh
(I also like how the article specifically makes sure to call the Biden and Obama administrations genocidal, as if that weren't a truth about... virtually all administrations, I guess. And while it's good to highlight that, I don't really see how that fact connects to anything the article is trying to say.)
Oh and, for all the excellent research this article makes, which sounds fine to me at a glance, it conveniently forgets to mention things like
- The Signal Foundation was established in 2018. OTF funding for Open Whisper Systems ended in 2016 - Yeah, Whittaker gets paid much more than she could ever be worth, but compared to similarly sized organizations in the for-profit sector, she is well undercompensated. Still critiqueworthy, but not like she eats up a whole big chunk of Signals funding alone - The post tries to characterize Signals operation as not lean, while Signal itself claims that it is. The sole reason the article gives for this characterization is how much the CEO earns, which is a very fair point of critique, but negligible compared to the rest of Signals operating cost, which is also fourth or fifth of the budget WhatsApp had used annually before it had been acquired by Facebook, which I bring up as a point because at that point, WhatsApp had comparable user counts to todays' Signal. I'd say that this makes Signal look pretty lean, and I'll also agree, that executives should not be taking 12% of the orgs' revenue to themselves. But I think the framing that Signal is apparently financially bloated is bullshit. - They say "Signal stores metadata about its users" and don't elaborate further, instead linking to a comment by a random user on Lemmy. Sweet. And having looked at that comment, yeah, it seems accurate that metadata exists about those who use the service, because that is just a technical necessity of how the internet works, I personally choose to believe the people who work and have worked at Signal who are saying that Signal does not retain any of this information. Sure, you could now make a point about "but your ISP or Amazon could still track this, and therefore the government could, too", but you cannot be seriously framing a chat app as bad or critiqueworthy because it isn't a magic tool to complete privacy and online anonymity.
I think the article does have good points. And there doesn't seem to be factual inaccuracy in the article, if you disseminate it and analyze each statement piece by piece. But I also think the article is written in a heavily opinionated way, which purposefully hides or misinterprets/skews facts, which seems veeeeeery fishy to me
@zenmaya@delta@collectifission sorry if the writing is kind of shit. I tried to take my time with disseminating the article and looking up whether the facts it presented are true but I am also getting sick so yay
1