CoyoteFacts

Since you’ve clearly not read or comprehended any of the subpoenas that I linked, nor the encryption analysis, nor read any of Signal’s blogposts, I see no point with responding any further. You are spreading FUD, and I question your motives.

No, and in fact they have fought to unseal and publish the articles they have. The point is that if you read the subpoenas, they request a lot of data from Signal and Signal can only ever return the phone number, account creation date, and last connected timestamp. So either Signal is consistently lying to various governments or they actually don’t have any of that data. Signal’s client is also open-source and has been audited, and they have published many blogposts about how the technology works.

I’d strongly recommend digging deeper into this and trusting the auditors and experts instead of dismissing it based on lazy and cynical guesses. If you don’t trust anyone you’re welcome to read the source code of the client yourself. Soatok recently posted an 8-part series going through Signal’s encryption that you can read as a primer: https://soatok.blog/2025/02/18/reviewing-the-cryptography-used-by-signal/.

Check their transparency log for subpoenas etc: https://signal.org/bigbrother/

There’s nothing wrong with Signal’s centralization model in a worrying sense. It acts only as a clueless message relay, and it has near-zero information on any of its users, even as it delivers messages from person to person. The only information Signal knows is if a phone number is registered and the last time it connected to the server. There is great care taken to make sure everything else is completely end-to-end encrypted and unknowable, even by subpoena.

The only real issue with Signal’s centralization is that if Signal the company goes down, then all clients can no longer work until someone stands up a new server to act as a relay again. Signal isn’t the endgame of privacy, but it’s the best we have right now for a lot of usecases, and it’s the only one I’ve had any luck converting normies to as it’s very polished and has a lot of features. IMO, by the time the central Signal server turns into an actual problem we’ll hopefully have excellent options available to migrate to.

Also TMK, the only reason you still need a phone number for Signal is to combat spam. You can disable your phone number being shown to anyone else in the app and only use temporary invite codes to connect with people, so I don’t count the phone number as a huge problem, though the requirement does still annoy me as it makes having multiple accounts more difficult and asserts a certain level of privilege.

Screen-sharing is part of chat apps nowadays. You’re fully within your rights to stay on IRC and pretend that featureful chat is not the norm these days, but that doesn’t mean society is going to move to IRC with you. Like it or not, encrypted chat apps have to become even more usable for the average person for adoption to go up. This reminds me of how all the old Linux-heads insisted that gaming was for children and that Linux didn’t need gaming. Suddenly now that Linux has gaming, adoption is going way up - what a coincidence.

Edit: Also for the record, I have a tech-savvy friend who refuses to move to Signal until there are custom emoji reactions, of all things. You can definitely direct your ire towards these people, but the reality is some people have a certain comfort target, and convincing them to settle for less is often harder than improving the app itself.