To be clear: I am avidly pro-Signal. I think this piece makes interesting arguments. Would love to hear what the community thinks
Are you looking for arguments against Signal?
I think the biggest one everyone will find and is very difficult to overcome is “My friends aren’t there”.
Other arguments like “it’s centralized”, “It’s in the US”, “It doesn’t have feature X”, “The client app doesn’t have fancy stickers” are workable, have explanations or are a matter of time.
Thos saying “It needs to support SMS”, are americans that weren’t really using signal, but a glorified text app.
Thos saying “It needs to support SMS”, are americans that weren’t really using signal, but a glorified text app.
People in the US aren’t the only people wanting support for SMS. I’m in New Zealand where using data STILL isn’t always reliable. SMS is often still necessary for messaging. And there’s plenty other countries besides that are the same. Mobile data connection just isn’t always feasible.
Yes, there are absolutely issues with SMS such as being able to track your location but at least with E2EE, the big bads won’t be able to see the contents of those SMS messages.
No to mention, for probably the majority of people, all they need is a text app. What’s wrong with wanting nothing more than text messaging but with privacy baked in?
I’m confused, did you think Signal’s SMS were E2EE? They were just regular SMS, identical in any way to how they were sent outside of signal. There was zero privacy advantage in sending an SMS from a signal client compared to another client.
No, I never thought that. It’s why I used Silence instead which did (and technically still does, even those development for it is dead) SMS encryption.
People were calling for Signal to do SMS encryption for ages (for the above mentioned lack of data) but Signal refused to implement it. Hence why Silence was started.
Thankfully data is a little better now in some places but still doesn’t change the fact that for some, SMS is the only practical means of communication and they deserve E2EE as much as anyone else, even if it doesn’t completely protect them.
