this post was submitted on 27 Feb 2026
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Privacy
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It's also important to continue educating people about the fact that Signal is incredibly problematic as well, but not in the way most people think.
The issue with Signal is that your phone number is metadata. And people who think metadata is "just" data or that cross-referencing is some kind of sci-fi nonsense, are fundamentally misunderstanding how modern surveillance works.
By requiring phone numbers, Signal, despite its good encryption, inherently builds a social graph. The server operators, or anyone who gets that data, can see a map of who is talking to whom. The content is secure, but the connections are not.
Being able to map out who talks to whom is incredibly valuable. A three-letter agency can take the map of connections and overlay it with all the other data they vacuum up from other sources, such as location data, purchase histories, social media activity. If you become a "person of interest" for any reason, they instantly have your entire social circle mapped out.
Worse, the act of seeking out encrypted communication is itself a red flag. It's a perfect filter: "Show me everyone paranoid enough to use crypto." You're basically raising your hand.
So, in a twisted way, Signal being a tool for private conversations, makes it a perfect machine for mapping associations and identifying targets. The fact that it operates using a centralized server located in the US should worry people far more than it seems to.
The kicker is that thanks to gag orders, companies are legally forbidden from telling you if the feds come knocking for this data. So even if Signal's intentions are pure, we'd never know how the data it collects is being used. The potential for abuse is baked right into the phone-number requirement.
The fact that Signal is operated centrally, and it's being developed by people with connections to US intelligence while being constantly pushed as the best solution for private communication should give everyone a pause.
Opinion: I think painting in Signal in such negative light is more harmful in the practical sense. Having fragmented messaging towards the public that does not care about many of these aspects just makes them a lot more hesitant to change, from my perspective.
We as a community should, in my opinion, pick a "good enough" solution for the majority of the people we interact with. That in itself is a market force to show interest and demand for private solutions. Most people I know don't have the tools or knowledge or time to understand nuances and all they'll hear are conflicting messages.
For us more technically inclined people: hell yeah, let's figure out the ideal model and bring it up to maturity so others can join when it's fleshed out. E.g. when lemmy came to my attention in the reddit 3rd party app fiasco, I was really confused on how to sign up and use it. And I'm no stranger to tech.
Edit: spelling
I'd probably suggest Deltachat. It's decentralized and has always on encryption, but is so incredibly simple and easy to onboard and use, and doesn't require a phone number or even an email. It also works on all platforms with a single app.
wait, doesn't it rely on the email system?
I would rather have signal possibly collect my social graph than google through gmail.
It uses a subset of the email protocol (which makes it very difficult for governments to block) but it no longer uses an an actual email address to function by default.
Even if someone did use a gmail exclusively for this (you can't use it with an email account you use for normal emails too), everything would be entirely encrypted, and only the app itself would be able to decrypt it (google would not be able to decrypt the messages). But again, no normal user is going to use an actual email address.
You can read more about how it works in their FAQ. But the short version is once you pick a username, it just gives you a QR code or link to send to people, which connects you immediately in an encrypted chat room with no faffing around with emails.