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Joined 6 months ago
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Cake day: June 29th, 2024

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  • Your arguments don’t really make sense in the context of you asking for Threema instead, even if you acknowledge that it isn’t optimal.

    [Signal] already showed that they’d like to keep the ecosystem locked down by not allowing 3rd party clients

    Neither does Threema, it is a closed eco system? And in fact there is Molly, a hardened Signal fork for Android

    At some point they will need a way to pay for their datacenters, […] i can see the pestering for donations getting much worse in the future.

    Threema is a paid app though. So you consider an app asking for donations worse than a paid one? I agree though that their financials aren’t the best, since they seem to be living off a loan, but thats even more an argument to donate.


  • This is hilarious and sad at the same time.

    You continue to misunderstand the word “misinformation”. It is incorrect information spread without intent. A mistake made that leads to incorrect information spreading, falls into that category. Especially as it is in the starting point of the discussion, where sources should have been provided.

    The need to feel victimized and a little bit of paranoia is strong in you, you should talk to someone about that. I am guessing that is caused by the lies and disinformation spread by your political party of choice. (I am only mentioning politics, because you brought it up with the feds conspiracy theory)

    If you went and looked at my account history, you would see that there are a few comments in german and my account is registered on a german server and coincidentally I am German. So much for your fed theory.

    My criticism has been nothing but constructive. I implore you for the future to do research using credible sources and to cite them, before making claims that could have a big impact. That goes for discussions on lemmy and as well in real life, when you are discussing or forming an opinion on an important topic.

    I hope you get the help you need!



  • Misinformation is the inadvertent spread of false information without intent to harm, while disinformation is false information designed to mislead others and is deliberately spread with the intent to confuse fact and fiction. Source

    This is more than a simple mistake and I am right to call it misinformation. I appreciate that you seem open to discussion about you being wrong. Nevertheless your post is still not edited to correct the proven wrong statements. You can use strikethrough so no context is lost, like I did in the comment you are replying to, where I was wrong.

    You made a post with huge claims, basically saying that signal is unsecure and messages can be read by the goverment. This is such a big claim that it should have been researched by you beforehand and you should have provided sources. You don’t get to hide behind “discussions” because in a discussion you actually provide sources if you make claims. Especially if you are trying to start one, to give the readers a chance to read up on the topic.

    You “getting a detail wrong“ has a huge impact. Some people will stumble upon this post, read that signal is supposedly insecure and might believe it and even spread that. It hurts the adoption of a secure encrypted messenger. It is not a small detail, but the foundation of your whole post.

    And I am mostly right, I just seem to have been wrong on the detail about Signal push notifications. […] This comes from the DOJ senator Wyden saying these corporations can secretly share this data with governments and can include the unencrypted text which is displayed in the notification.

    No, you are mostly wrong about the claims you make! Again your post made the connection to signal. Push notifications for Signal NEVER contain sensitive unencrypted data & do not reveal the contents of any Signal messages or calls–not to Apple, not to Google, not to anyone but you & the people you’re talking to. Source

    “spreading misinformation” is a phrase mostly used by feds when they see something they consider to be “wrong think” or not “politically correct”. They use this anti-misinformation campaign to support their censorship and mass surveillance system.

    I don‘t appreciate you, trying to frame my correction of your blatant misinformation as trying to censor you. Don‘t try to play the victim.




  • You are just spreading misinformation! Cite your sources!

    There is a strategy used, which allows the government to find out who an account belongs to. They ask the push providers (Apple/Google) for data on the push token from e.g. a messaging app. This way they associate the account from an app with an identity.

    Nothing there about message content. It is still safely E2EE.

    I don’t know how it works in your country, but in mine, phone numbers are already associated with identities, so nothing gained as the gov can just ask signal for the phone number of an account, instead of having to ask signal and the push provider to get the identity. (Edit: apparently it’s hashed, so there seems to be a use for this.) Signal isn’t about Anonymity but Privacy. There is a difference.

    If you have another vulnerability cite it!



  • Wow, the whole argument of the article is basically: funded in part by US government = bad, and making a lot of assumptions, nothing more.

    The fund is designated to: “support open technologies and communities that increase free expression, circumvent censorship, and obstruct repressive surveillance as a way to promote human rights and open societies."

    One should question the commitment of a fund that dedicates itself to “obstructing surveillance”, while being created by a government who runs the most expansive surveillance system in world history. And how the US might define the terms “human rights”, and “open society” differently from those who know the US’s history in those areas.

    How laughable, that is not an argument, it’s nothing more than a guessing game, ignoring that there are different parts of government and different objectives can be true.

    Signal’s use luckily never caught on by the general public of China, whose government prefers autonomy, rather than letting US tech control its communication platforms, as most of the rest of the world naively allows. (For example, India’s most popular social media apps, are Facebook and Youtube, meaning that US surveillance giants own and control the everyday communications of a country much larger than their own). Signal instead became used by US and western activists, and due to the contradictions of surveillance capitalism, also now its general populace.

    You have to be kidding right? Championing china, which created a fucking surveillance state and is heavily monitoring the citizens, as an example?



  • I personally am fine with making it opt-out, but I think it should be handled differently. This technology requires users trust, to have any chance of being successful. Enabling it without informing the user is not the way to gain it.

    I would have put a little pop up explaining that they are trying to create a privacy preserving technology to measure ads with the goal of replacing privacy invasive technology. If the user doesn’t like it, it can be disabled in the settings afterwards.


  • I haven’t looked into the technicals much further than the support page.

    The way i read it, it sounds like the companies will get some general data if their ads work without a profile about you being created. I would be fine with that. What I don’t like is the lack of communication to users about it being enabled.

    PPA does not involve websites tracking you. Instead, your browser is in control. This means strong privacy safeguards, including the option to not participate.

    Privacy-preserving attribution works as follows:

    1. Websites that show you ads can ask Firefox to remember these ads. When this happens, Firefox stores an “impression” which contains a little bit of information about the ad, including a destination website.
    2. If you visit the destination website and do something that the website considers to be important enough to count (a “conversion”), that website can ask Firefox to generate a report. The destination website specifies what ads it is interested in.
    3. Firefox creates a report based on what the website asks, but does not give the result to the website. Instead, Firefox encrypts the report and anonymously submits it using the Distributed Aggregation Protocol (DAP) to an “aggregation service”.
    4. Your results are combined with many similar reports by the aggregation service. The destination website periodically receives a summary of the reports. The summary includes noise that provides differential privacy.

    This approach has a lot of advantages over legacy attribution methods, which involve many companies learning a lot about what you do online.

    PPA does not involve sending information about your browsing activities to anyone. This includes Mozilla and our DAP partner (ISRG). Advertisers only receive aggregate information that answers basic questions about the effectiveness of their advertising.

    This all gets very technical, but we have additional reading for anyone interested in the details about how this works, like our announcement from February 2022 and this technical explainer.