- cross-posted to:
- signal@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- signal@lemmy.ml
When I press on some message to forward it, it shows me Random usernames of contacts I don’t know. And it even shows some Mobile Numbers I don’t know. For example, one number starts with +964 that’s Iraq. I’m from Europe tho. These contacts and numbers are from all over the place.
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I just counted. Signal leaked 56 random people to me.
Has anyone else been able to reproduce this? I just tried and was not able to.
OP, is it possible these people were in group chats you were part of?
No, they are not. I’m in two groups. None of them are in the groups. I only use Signal for Real life friends from my Country. I never joined any random group. These people are from all over the world.
Interesting. Are there any other accounts on your phone that provide contacts? Maybe social media or other chat platforms? On Android you can see accounts in Settings > Passwords & Accounts (or somewhere similar; it varies a little between brands). You can also check inside your Contacts app by expanding the sidebar (again, varies by brand).
Just a thought. I don’t have any other contact providers on my phone so I can’t test it myself.
Please keep us posted if you get any official response or learn anything new!
Nope. And I maybe had to add (did it now) that this only appears to be a problem with Signal Desktop. My signal app on android doesn’t even show other contacts from strangers. I will update this if I get a response, of course.
Group chats very likely. There are often sync issues from mobile, so these may just be old spam or group chat numbers.
Could it be that these are spam numbers that tried to reach you at some point but were blocked before they could?
They should have added usernames YEARS ago, but instead they go and remove SMS support in the client…
Why did someone see that I joined Signal? People who already know your number and already have you in their contacts see that they can contact you on Signal. Nothing is sent to them by your Signal app or the Signal service. They just see a number they know is registered. If someone knows how to send you an insecure SMS, we want them to see that they can send you a Signal message instead.
Why did I see that my contact joined Signal? You are notified when someone that is stored in your contact list is a new Signal user. If you can send an insecure SMS to a contact, we want you to know you can send a Signal message instead.
I hate this.
So Signal does not protect against those that fill their contacts with every existing number?
But also, this does not explain why is it only happening in the desktop app for OP
Protect against what? People knowing you have Signal? Excuse me if it’s obvious to everyone else, but I’m struggling to understand the issue here.
It confirms that your number is valid and in use.
You can check that in the phone app too. Hit new message, enter the numer, hit "New message to… " and it’ll tell you if it isn’t known. There is rate limiting in that function, you’d need a lot of signal accounts to sweep all phone numbers.
You could also try signing up to signal using the number you want to check.Neither way however you would get the signal name or profile pic of the number if I understand it correctly, that would get sent if they reply to you.
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It’s a necessary feature if you are using phone numbers. Signal has to tell you if your message has any chance of being received.
I don’t want to message someones number, to find out they never got my message and don’t have signal a few days later, and I don’t want to message them via whatsapp too, giving them a chance to use that when they have signal.
I mean, ever heard of a phonebook?
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I don’t need to understand that it’s an issue for you, but I want to understand why it’s an issue for you.
Wtf is happening in these comments
No clue.
What?
I’ve been getting spam on signal. I wonder if this is how they got my number
Noticed in one of your comments this is happening on Signal desktop. Is this a windows machine? Maybe update your post so people are aware it’s no on Android
Use molly
My confidence in signal is greater than my confidence in a random fork. Privacy is hard… So I feel it’s better to trust something less than ideal, than to trust a random dude promising to solve all problems…
That’s just my threat model.
Also don’t get me wrong. Molly might be written by less experienced programmers. And if it was written from scratch, it could be very likely it would contain more vulnerabilities per 1000 lines of code than standard Signal app. But it’s mostly just it’s a hardened superset sans some nasty stuff. I’d compare that more to how Calyx or GrapheneOS are to plain AOSP than how some low maintenance random custom ROM from XDA with fuckton of bells and whistles that will leave your bootloader unlocked is.
Have you seen signal’s issue tracker? Ik it’s a big project, but it’s literally getting spammed, plus the desktop app that keeps database key in plaintext and won’t work natively under wayland (needs xwayland, making basic stuff like sending attachments hard if you use most tiling compositor, tho that’s partly Wayland’s design flaw of lacking consistent reference implementation). Also I principally don’t trust apps that rely on both proprietary network services and libraries. The very fact that they don’t leverage their funding to reduce their costs by working on support for federation that is not a matrix bridge (which hasn’t been even developed by them btw) or decentralization, especially since XMPP, SimpleX and Matrix (which has currently 3 well developed server implementations: Synapse, Dendrite and Conduit) have been able to do so with much smaller funding. And it’s Signal, not Molly’s maintainers who have been putting more effort into shiny UX improvements over hardening infrastructure code lately. And even if Signal does improve it’s security, the patches get regularly backported into Molly, whereas even such basic shit implemented solely in Molly, such as app passwords that actually encrypt it’s database is pretty useful. Because even PIN scrambling is not fully immune to shoulder surfing. Defense in deph matters.
tl;dr a longer rant about decentralization vs federation 👇
Even the argument of network effect achieved thanks to reliance on phone numbers is becoming less relevant these days, with DeltaChat providing a convenient way to have encrypted chats using the existing email infrastructure in much more convenient way than traditional PGP. Pixelfed has already achieved E2EE DMs and it’s being worked on for Mastodon. If the UI of the most popular apps and the official web interface are also redesigned to make messaging more convenient to use it might have the same positive effect on user retention as Facebook Messenger once had. Anyway things are bound to change in favor of federation, but not necessarily decentralization. For instance I got mixed feelings about EU’s DMA. I’m optimistic about the interoperability benefits it could bring, but even the official act doesn’t specify how it’ll be implemented. If it relies on something like WebFinger which does require a domain name it’ll end up just grouping a couple of major walled gardens together, so for example SimpleX, Session or Status users still might not be able to chat with people on centralized platforms
Well. I personally am very annoyed that i can’t choose a specific pin for signal. That means my kid can read my messages, because yes… Keeping password from a child is neigh impossible. But my pin for element, fairmail, telegram he don’t know.
So i get a lot of the criticism. For me personally, it’s still a matter of trust. A future malicious molly version might eavesdrop. Signal will probably not do so.
Encryption at rest on an unlocked phone is probably a hard problem. But if somebody is targeting me to that extent, i am probably toast anyways.
I try to create enough usage so that journalists and activists can hide in the mob, and i can hide from fang.
I use element, but do worry about the local server implementation and leak of metadata.
have been able to do so with much smaller funding
It’s easy to “stand on the shoulders of giants” and claim some software is better when you’re adding 1-5% of additional work on top of a fully developed service/app/infrastructure. It’s why generally forks of software tend to have more features than the original source - See the following examples where people polish something and release it as their own improved creation:
- Chromium/Chrome > Edge/Brave
- Debian > Ubuntu/Mint/Pop!_OS
- Android Open Source Project (AOSP) > WhateverSamsung’s_is_called
- Firefox > LibreWolf
Now, I’m not trying to say people should stop forking software, I’m all for it as it breeds competition and innovation, but to complain that a software project is not meeting your specific demands and their forks are doing so much more means you’re not understanding the other projects would probably die without all the hard work that goes on in the core product.
whereas even such basic shit implemented solely in Molly, such as app passwords that actually encrypt it’s database is pretty useful.
You say this but do you have any evidence to back up the claim that it’s useful and to who? Who’s asking for it? What percentage of Signal users would enable the feature? Is it 1%. Is that worth it? There’s barely a demand for privacy from the general populace otherwise Signal would be a hit and everyone would leave Whatsapp immediately, but it isn’t.
if you use most tiling compositor
You’re the 1% of the 1% when it comes to desktop configurations if you’re using a tiling window manager. I used one about 10 years ago and have yet to find one other person in the real world who has ever used one and I work in IT. Whether you like it or not, Signal developers are not going to spend any effort on making your very niche use case any better. I’m not saying that to be rude, but you have to be realistic. Your expectations are high for a free service that generally works for 99% of the population.
It wasn’t my intention to state that an extensions of certain big software is always better or should get all the credit. No. First of all, I consider Molly protestware and second of all, the thing about being able to do federation and whatnot with much smaller funding was not about Molly. It was about simplex, matrix, XMPP, E2EE for Fedi and handful other decentralized/federated projects. Signal already has been downloaded hundreds of millions of times according to App Store/Play Store and received countless endorsements. And they did in fact face outages after receiving one from Elon Muskrat. So, they needed to find ways to scale better. Their server software could in theory be self hosted, but unlike Matrix or XMPP, it won’t federate so in a way it’s even worse than e-mail when it comes to this. One would thus think that it’s implicit that they would finally add the possibility to let people run their own servers or even devolve towards more P2P-oriented design. But instead they’ve decided to partner with a pump and dump shitcoin scheme whose privacy-friendliness was absolute trash, though granted, that was also at a time when every tech company was trying to join the Web3 hype. Now their reach is even bigger, but has grown at a steadier pace. I won’t try to go more tinfoil here with any unsubstantiated suspicions and begging the question but even though decentralized or federated systems are harder to design in a way that makes them secure, centralized ones are more abusable and create a single point of failure that can affect a large share of the user base.
Its not a problem with the Android App.
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56 different numbers from all over the world, and all of them are actually real and have signal? I doubt I accidentally do something like this haha :)
This is what the docs say.
https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360007061452-Does-Signal-send-my-number-to-my-contacts-
am glad that https://simplex.chat doesn’t even need to touch sensitive personal data strong selectors such as phone numbers or email addresses!
Why is this being downvoted?
Likely because while simplex looks great and is very promising, it doesn’t add much to the conversation here. Signal is primarily a replacement for SMS/MMS, this means people generally would want their contacts readily available and discoverable to minimize the friction of securely messaging friends/family. Additionally it’s dangerous to be recommending a service that hasn’t been audited nor proven itself secure over time.
I think some people get lost and don’t realize that this is a privacy-centric community.
The mere potential for identifier leaking is 100% anti-privacy.
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I already made a bug report on Signal’s Website. Wouldn’t that be a duplicate.
Why would you send them to the Android repo instead of https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Desktop?
For all of our safety, consider submitting a bugreport.
Thanks for the Link. I submitted a report.
link to report so we can track? thanks!
I don’t think it’s the same user, but here’s a report on GitHub with same repro
This is a totally different thing, and I also don’t get what the problem of this user is. He wants to share a picture and then just like on android the list of your recent chats opens where of course the pofilepic shows to know where you want to send it to, and he somehow doesn’t want the profile pic to be there even tho this is totally normal behavior from android and iOS since… always? Or do I misunderstand his problem because I don’t use iOS? Well the most important part, it doesn’t sound like my problem at all.
What that user is describing is very serious. They are saying iOS can reach into Signal and extract data.
The user is describing iOS’ share sheet, which Signal seems to advertise as a feature. The OS isn’t reaching in and grabbing data, Signal is providing data to the OS.
Also note that said user signaled this on the Signal-Android repo, which combined with their inability to find this info, when i don’t even own an iOS device, makes me think they aren’t the most observant user out there.
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Im not getting spam. I never said that I get spam. But ok.
