I don’t know if I’m opening a can of worms here, and I’m still trying to backtrack a lot of history where I was tuning everything out. I keep seeing random swipes at Signal (or the representatives (?)), and I was wondering whether they are founded or just lies.Is it another situation like Lemmy where we just “take the technology and move on”? Thanks!
And some people don’t like it because it used to handle SMS on Android, and they removed that feature for security reasons.
This was such a dumb decision
That was a pretty wild decision
Handling SMS and handling secure/encrypted messages could’ve made people think they communicate securely while relying on text messages instead.
Not handling SMS fixes this source of confusion and I applaud their decision.
There were ways to make it clear that it was insecure that didn’t alienate an arguable majority of their casual userbase.
If only the was some indicator for unsecure messages, such as a grey send button and an open padlock. 🙄
I think the number of people who care deeply about privacy and cannot tell the difference between an sms or signal message is minimal. There were plenty of ways signal could have highlighted DANGER UNSECURE CHANNEL if they had wanted to, or made it an off-by-default option, rather than drop SMS entirely. For myself and many other people it meant that family members dropped Signal rather than have an extra messaging app, and so I’m still stuck with WhatsApp on my phone…
The problem is that most people don’t want multiple text apps, they just want one. I had gotten a number of people using signal, and it was secure when we talked, but when signal dropped SMS, almost every one of them stopped using it, so then none of their conversations were secure.
Yeah, the never-ending weighting between convenience and security.
But are you going to tell me that those people don’t have Whatsapp, Threema, Telegram or any other IM installed and just use plain SMS instead?
Yep, just the default messaging app on their phone.
I think having an unlocked symbol for standard SMS would’ve helped that…
And you seriously think most people would look at and act on such an icon instead of just ignoring it?
Or just accept that not everyone will be having a secure conservation, but more will be secured as more and more people like me convince our family members to use it and eventually we transition everyone away from SMS?
No, of course not, why would we build a critical mass of users like that?
Since they removed SMS support almost my entire family and my friends uninstalled signal, except a few who keep it to talk to me, and my half dozen friends privacy-conscious enough to care. Dozens of people, down to eight if you don’t count me, in my circles alone. Objectively, removing SMS support harmed Signal’s popularity and made everyone less secure. The argument for why they did it was at best myopic and also, in my opinion, utter bullshit.
It was very unpopular with my girlfriend, who I had just gotten into using Signal a few months prior.
This might be offtopic but:
Fun Fact, you can use an open source app like Secure Space Encryptor (SSE) (on iOS its called “Paranoia Text Encryption”) to convert any string of text into a encrypted ciphertext, and you can then copy-paste that ciphertext and send it over any medium, like SMS, without the internet. (Most encrypted messaging apps require you have to have internet AFIAK, so people without a data plan is fucked, but with SSE, you can just send ciphertext over SMS) Its not intergrated with SMS, so you’ll have to type plaintext in the app then copy paste the ciphertext it spits out.
Or you can also PGP over SMS
I remember when Signal used to intergrate with SMS, and I kinda liked that more than the Signal today where you have to use the internet and go through their servers.
Getting people to switch to Signal was difficult in the first place Imagine trying to get them to use PGP lmao
xD
there’s oversec on f-droid that can almost automate this
This got me thinking that it should also be possible to automate on iOS with Shortcuts….
Oh yea that overlay thingy, kinda glitchy last time I tried it. If someone is techy enough to manage that clunkiness, then they probably can figure out how to manually copy-paste with SSE.
Btw, these apps are for nerds, not for the average person. No one irl that I know (besides me) would be willing to use either app.
This is how TextSecure worked before it was renamed to Signal and removed SMS support.