[areoform]

Signal should come out swinging. Here's a pitch.

The Government is going to put a snitch on every phone, tape every bedroom, and listen in every evening on every home. Every doctor's visit. Every therapy session. Every pub. Every street. Every store.

When the snitches phone home, what you type to your lover may get the cops sent to your home.

Artificial stasi in every desktop, laptop, tablet, camera, and phone. Around every corner. In every living room. No one will be exempt from their gaze.

Are you ready for your vacuum cleaner to phone home?

[thenthenthen]

Signal the messaging app/platform? A funny thing is that Signal barely works (with VPN ofc) here in China. Sending media/images is impossible. Sometimes it’s blacked out weeks on end. Everything else seems to work fine ish (again with VPN ofc).

[autoexec]

Signal outright lies in their privacy policy. It opens with "Signal is designed to never collect or store any sensitive information." but they collect and permanently store sensitive information in the cloud (user's name, photo, number, and contacts) and in some cases they even store the contents of messages. They've steadfastly refused to update the policy even as they introduced those features deceiving users about their risks. Signal can't really be trusted at this point.

[ryan_n]

> in some cases they even store the contents of messages

I hadn't heard this before. Doesn't that kind of defeat the entire purpose of using the app?

[autoexec]

It's an opt-in feature. https://techcrunch.com/2025/09/08/signal-introduces-free-and...

A service that advertises itself as privacy focused refusing to update their privacy policy while adding features like this seems like a pretty big dead canary.

[throwaway349520]

Did we read the same article? You're complaining about an optional back-up service. No data is being "collected," you're giving it to them (in an encrypted form) to store on your behalf. How else would a backup service work?

If you don't want to use the cloud version, there's a feature to store backups locally on-device.

Signal blog: https://signal.org/blog/introducing-secure-backups/

HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45170515

[trumpdong]

It's hardly optional, they keep nagging you to turn it on until one day you accidentally do. Protected by only a 4-digit PIN by the way.

[autoexec]

> You're complaining about an optional back-up service. No data is being "collected,"

Every app offering cloud-based backup is in fact designed to "collect and store" sensitive data. That at least is opt in. The app also collects your name, photo, phone number and worst of all a list of your contacts and permanently keeps that in the cloud and there is zero way to opt out of that data collection. No matter what excuses you want to make for them there is no getting around the fact that the device does collect and store sensitive data. Just like it can't be denied that they've added several new features none of which is reflected in their privacy policy because they've frozen it in time.

This is an app which is advertised to whistleblowers, activists, and others whose lives/freedom could depend on how well they understand the risks involved yet Signal outright lies to them about those same risks.

[dgellow]

I’m afraid too many people would hear that and say „I don’t care“

[saltwatercowboy]

AKA The Witness in Nick Harkaway's novel Gnomon.

[iugtmkbdfil834]

Shrug. If they don't, they will lose the customers who do care about privacy and they won't lose the ones that don't .. right away. However, it will near guarantee further fragmentation and circling a new solution that will be recommended to normies by their techy friends or current batch of cool kids. We have been here before. The only way to win the game is not to play. Especially with government, the moment you start playing, you lose.