Arguments for Signal over Whatsapp, Messenger, and SnapChat
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Just because the tech guy is a tech guy doesn't mean they have a sense of privacy, or even know what tech can do, harm wise.. maybe for them it's just hardware specs and Windows installations everyday
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First of all, Signals code is open. Many people arround the world can check (and they already did) if the messenger lives up to its promises, is secure, private and so on. The others are not. Whatever you think they do, you have to trust a company like Meta. You wanna be that naive?
All those apps collect data: when you are online, where you are online, who is talking to who. Maybe also what you are talking about... we can't know. For example: Some psychatrists do not use WhatsApp because using such an app in the waiting room would provide Meta with information like 'you have mental health issues'.
Signal on the other hand does verifiable not collect such data.We also can see bahaviours coming from big companies to direct societies into a direction of their favor. They act like this, because maximum profit and power is what they are working for - they are simply companies. Signal on the other hand is a foundation which aims to provide security, encryption, privacy and fight against censorship (not in terms of content but in terms of countries blocking messenger services). What could be the more trustworthy base?
Btw Signal uses donations to pay their development and Servers so you can use the app for free. What does Meta use to handle costs for WhatsApp, Facebook and so on... Maybe they are charitable
To name differences:
- No adds
- No tracking
- Local backup (not on Google services or something like that)
- No exchange of personal data like phone number (they use a hash instead)
- You can use a pseudonym in form of a user name to get in contact with others (without telling them your phone number) and you can easily delete it and use a new one
- Signal created the Signal protocol which is called the gold standard, as it is the most secure and to encryption mechanism. They were the first so add resistance against quantum computers
And finally the better question is:
Why should the world use WhatsApp and co and not Signal? They do not have one advantage. If the whole world would use Signal, Threema or similar apps, it wouldn't lose anything but would win so much. Think about that -
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.
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Variants of this exact question seem to be asked at the rate of about 3 per week.
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This is how I see it too. It's why I use Telegram (which I know is dodgy) but not Whatsapp.
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I tried arguing along similar lines. Failed and fell flat on my face when it came to history. There's so much chat history on WhatsApp for instance that without a way to port it all over to Signal, near impossible if that to bring people over.
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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
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That's true! I can't wait to "shoot" back with arguments
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And here I am waiting for Sup to be released by an adrenaline-filled code-junkie from Grand Prairie, Alberta...
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Thank you for the list of arguments
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That's so true. I thought so too, but Person A I a hard but to crack
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So good written, and understandable. Thank yiu
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Also the FBI took signal to court and the only data they could provide was the date of signup and last login timestamp
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Here are 28 arguments for you to use.
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Practically speaking, there's a huge difference.
RCS/iMessage are great. They're a huge upgrade over SMS, however, the E2E statements they make aren't really verifiable to the degree necessary to call them secure. They also require hardware compatibility, software compatibility, environment compatibility (root breaks RCS) as well as network compatibility so the pool of devices that work both ways with RCS is still pretty small. It's frankly a mess.
Realistically speaking, he's right. There's no difference. People don't casually message information which is important enough to require perfect forward secrecy. So at the end of the day choose which works best for you and if you do dumb shit like sending credit card and social security numbers over clearnet, then prepare to have your anus widened.
I personally prefer running an MTProto proxy on top of Telegram. I control the proxy, so I can view where the network traffic is going in transit for the most part. Is MTProto perfect? No. But it's vastly improved since previous independent audits and it's "good enough."
If critically sensitive information has to touch a device with internet access then you need a mature security protocol like PGP or some other shared key cryptography so you can verifiably ensure you're talking to whom you're supposed to be talking to. If that's something you're interested in, give Keybase a try. It's a really great platform built around a really great technology (PGP). The mobile application comes with a chat option that uses your PGP key to symmetrically encrypt your chat messages using Scrypt (with PBKDF2) making it significantly more secure than any other option mentioned here.
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WhatsApp fails to include a libre software licence text file. We do not control it, anti-libre software.
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These are not designed to penetrate disinformation.
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Both easy, backdoor the idea.
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If we can't self host Signal, it isn't much better than WhatsApp.
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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.
