Privacy

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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

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"The sins of the 90s": Questioning a puzzling claim by Meredith Whittaker about mass surveillance (blog.cr.yp.to)

submitted 1 day ago by cypherpunks@lemmy.ml to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

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[–] BearOfaTime@lemm.ee 5 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

Wow, great article, thanks for the link.

The moment I read the quote from Signal's president, I called bullshit. I was there, working at a company that had massive records, probably of about 1/3 of Americans.

We were very much concerned with this data in private hands. We were concerned about this kind of data in anyone's hands.

Such BS coming from Signal is part of why I no longer use or reccomend the app. I simply can't trust them when they make such blatantly bullshit statements.

Like their reasononing for dropping SMS support because the "engineering costs". There's nothing your app does for SMS, other than to hand the message to the SMS system (technically, it reads and writes to the single SMS database on Android, which was a change implemented in about 2015), using a published API.

I'm starting to suspect the motives after reading such lies.

[–] thayerw@lemmy.ca 7 points 1 day ago

I can't say that I'm surprised when a privacy-focused company has a dose of unfounded or biased paranoia. For me, this is not reason enough to distrust them.

I also don't fault them for doing away with SMS when most of the populated world had already moved away from SMS by then too. As a North American relying on SMS for about half of my messaging needs at the time, I wasn't happy about it either. But I don't fault them for making that decision, and ultimately it did push me to rely on more secure options, which I see as a good thing.