The Crypto AG story shows that the location of a company doesn’t matter that much. The US simply made legal what they were already doing behind the scenes. Intelligence services have always been and still are above the law.

Unpopular takes incoming.

Signal.

Way too many red flags.

• Why ask for mandatory phone numbers? You could at least make it opt in.
• Why we can’t inspect the latest server code?
• Why not make it easy for people to run their own servers?

Do you truly believe that a company that wants to preserve your privacy would take this direction?

And i don’t care how secure the protocol is, how well the code is audited. They can still map your social graph.

Anyways, because of my threat model, i still use Signal. But if i were an activist i wouldnt touch it.

More unpopular takes:

Tor and Mullvad probably compromised too. If a service gets too mainstream, I dont believe for a second that they would let it run without care. They would take it down, or control it.

Now, these services are still usefull. For example mt threat model is to deny my shit to the big tech. So they are useful if you want to escape data collection for adversiment purposes.

I don’t think they would burn the reputation of these services for low hanging fruit like selling data for ads.

Now that you tell me, I think i have heard about that before. It does make a bit of sense, there may be some of both things to this madness. While speculation i value the observation and i will keep it mind, thank you for sharing it.

Fully agree, while people losing jobs to ai is sad, i have zero sympathies for meta employees. They knew pretty well how insidious that company is, and as you said, they are smart enough to find a good enough job in another company.

A bit off topic, but all this ai stuff replacing so many jobs is a bit baffling to me. At least for certain jobs. It’s not like in the industrial revolution where you could see tangible results in production and efficiency. Even if it come at a terrible human cost you could see the cold logic.
Here in change, they are firing good talent only to get a subpar costlier replacement. Sure there are some places where it works, but i don’t believe it’s yet to the scale where you would fire so many people.

I suppose the wet dreams of a future with no employees is too good to pass.

(From South America)

About phones, same advice as monovergent, i use a separate phone for things that require google and another one for work. It’s not ideal since they probably can correlate them, but it’s the best compromise i found.

About ID, you are required to show it for most of the things you ask, which I think is reasonable. We don’t have face id thankfully yet

Thanks for the explanation!

Since we are on the topic of signal… im not tech saviie but i have read lots of blogs and people about how secure is the signal protocol. My question is … how can i be sure that the protocol is implemented as the open source code shows? Please correct me if im wrong but from what i read on their website the apk they provide has the capability to update itself at anytime. So what stops them to change how it works with an update? is it posible to build the apk yourself and stop the ability to update?