Privacy

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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

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Signal in 2026? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 3 weeks ago by guymontag@lemmy.ml to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

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Is it still viable to use Signal for privacy in 2026? It's centralized, and has had many suspicious occurrences in the past.(Unopen source server code, careless whisper exploit which is still active as far as I know, and the whole mobile coin situation.)

Thoughts?

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[–] axx@slrpnk.net 1 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (1 children)

I think you're missing historical context. There are more options now, but when Signal came out (or became Signal, after TextSecure), it was the only tool to offer such strong cryptographic properties with its then novel double ratchet algorithm. Compared to OTR and, much worse, all the other crap that was not E2E encrypted at all, it was the first really credible option on a mass scale.

The crypto was reviewed by well-considered experts, and came out looking strong.

Telegram fought for years trying to say they were just as good and in fact better, which is entirely disingenuous considering it's not an encrypted messaging app.

These things contributed to what you call the cult following. Which wouldn't be negative (a cult film has a cult following) if not intended to mean "a cult like Scientology".

[–] yogthos@lemmy.ml 2 points 3 weeks ago

But that's precisely what makes the whole thing cultish in a negative sense. A decade ago you could make the argument that Signal was doing something special, but that hasn't been the case for a long time. The continued adherence to the app is utterly irrational today.