• smeg@feddit.uk
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    10 months ago

    Meta … can’t guarantee “what a third-party provider does with sent or received messages.”

    I’m more concerned with what the first-party provider is doing with my sent or received messages when that first-party is Facebook!

    • unrelatedkeg@lemmy.sdf.org
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      10 months ago

      Meta … can’t guarantee “what a third-party provider does with sent or received messages.”

      We (Meta) can guarantee that we do all the bad stuffs to your data!

    • Fartsival@lemmy.sdf.org
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      10 months ago

      They have already announced that they will not be interoperable with insecure messaging apps unfortunately.

    • flora_explora@beehaw.org
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      10 months ago

      Why not convince people to use Signal as well? Even my family has a group chat on Signal. Of course, it’s a slow move with most people sticking to non-open chats. But it’s worth the effort I would say.

      • variants@possumpat.io
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        10 months ago

        Yeah after two years even my parents and brother are on signal plus most of my close friends, the rest I just use regular sms

        • InfiniWheel@lemmy.one
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          10 months ago

          Most of the world doesn’t use SMS, they use WhatsApp. Plus, SMS is even worse than WhatsApp for privacy and security. And stopping using WhatsApp in most of the world is like not using email, so no “I don’t have WhatsApp, you can only contact me through signal” is possible.

          • flora_explora@beehaw.org
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            10 months ago

            That’s always the problem with monopolies and big corporations. They make it harder for you as an individual to use alternatives.

            • InfiniWheel@lemmy.one
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              10 months ago

              I don’t just mean socially speaking. But for contacting services and stuff. My car insurance company only accepts reports through Whatsapp or through calling a guy to come look at your face for a fee.

                • Akuchimoya@startrek.website
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                  10 months ago

                  In some different countries, WhatsApp is how people conduct business. I am anti WhatsApp in my regular life, but I used it with a VOIP number when I was traveling abroad.

                  It’s one thing to tell your friends and family you use Signal, you can’t tell literally every business. Well, you can, they just won’t to do business with you.

      • HappyRedditRefugee@lemm.ee
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        10 months ago

        It might work with people you know but is harder to convince people you just met, that’s the reason I still use Whatsapp and recently opened an Instagram.

        • Marvin42@feddit.nl
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          10 months ago

          Yeah, but you can still chat with them on the insecure messenger. You can have both on your phone.

          What would be the win if signal would support sending messages to WhatsApp? You’d still be putting your trust into meta.

          • HappyRedditRefugee@lemm.ee
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            10 months ago

            I do have both.

            I didnt say anything about the interoperability. I can imagine some wins… but nothing game changing tbh.

      • LifeBandit666@feddit.uk
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        10 months ago

        I remember the days when I spent time convincing people to use chat apps. The last one that stuck was WhatsApp.

        I’ve since stopped installing new chat apps because people won’t use them.

        WhatsApp just works. Wanna video call my Mum? Push a button. Wanna send a Lemmy meme to my mates? Yeah it’s 3 taps.

        I open up Facebook on me birthday and press the ❤️ on the birthday messages then shut it down and don’t use it for another year.

        But if I do that with WhatsApp then I don’t hear from people I actually care about.

        I actually have a friend that refuses to use WhatsApp like I do with FaceFuck. “How does she do it then?” I hear you ask.

        She uses Facebook Messenger.

        That’s the hold Meta has on our communications

        • flora_explora@beehaw.org
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          10 months ago

          Meanwhile I can do all that what you describe on Signal just as easily as that. A friend of mine often sends me Instagram reels on signal because I don’t have any insta account. And I actually don’t know anyone who has or at least uses a fb account anymore xD

    • helenslunch@feddit.nl
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      10 months ago

      Signal absolutely should not interoperate with other data-mining software.

      And they won’t, for the same reason they removed SMS (no insecure messaging options).

        • helenslunch@feddit.nl
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          10 months ago

          It’s not useless. It has a very specific use that does not coincide with interoperability with data-mining corporations.

        • KrokanteBamischijf@feddit.nl
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          10 months ago

          Yeah I believe this to be a fallacy. If all your contacts use WhatsApp, they still haven’t grasped the concept of installing two applications side-by-side. Or they don’t fully understand why people are using signal over WhatsApp. If you fail both of those, congratulations, you’ve failed to be a self-aware tech user and you’re now demoted to a braindead consumer.

          I know, mind blowing right? Point is, society in general should not accept others forcing you to keep the WhatsApp monopoly in tact, which is exactly what’s happening here.

          It will take some time but eventually adoption will spread, even among your contacts. It’s just a matter of critical mass, and there are some pretty compelling features within Signal that make it a worthy replacement.

          • jol@discuss.tchncs.de
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            10 months ago

            Most people are indeed technically not savvy and don’t understand why they would need more than WhatsApp and Instagram on their phone.

    • Blackmist@feddit.uk
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      10 months ago

      Eh, my missus insisted we use Signal, but it’s just flat out not as reliable. It misses messages very occasionally and it’s always at the worst possible time.

      Like I get that it’s a tiny bit more private than Whatsapp, but I’m not running a terror cell or a paedo ring over here. I just want to know if she wants anything from the shop.

    • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org
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      10 months ago

      It depends on whether they get a fair offer, or a bullshit one that has to work through the courts and be officially ruled bullshit before they’ll offer anything better.

  • jherazob@beehaw.org
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    10 months ago

    I dislike when they say in news clips that Signal represents the “current gold standard” for E2EE chats, it doesn’t, Signal is a helluva lot better than the commercial stuff that mines user data but there’s stuff like SimpleX Chat that doesn’t leak even metadata because it doesn’t have it.

    Still, this is a good thing, these megacorps have their iron grip on people because they have raised walls around their services making it painful for people to move to a different service, tearing down those walls can only help us all.

    • shrugal@lemm.ee
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      10 months ago

      A standard is also about broad adoption though, so I don’t think you can call SimpleX a standard yet.

    • Natanael@slrpnk.net
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      10 months ago

      The standard is about the protocol, not every bit of the implementation. 3DH / X3DH and double ratchet, etc, are among the best for E2EE.

    • Syfrix@lemm.ee
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      10 months ago

      Thanks for the tip about SimpleX, that looks interesting! I could never use Signal due to the way they operate and force you to rely on their and Google’s servers, actively blocking forks from their network. So much for FOSS…

      • Miss Brainfarts@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        10 months ago

        They do provide an apk outside of the Play Store, that uses a Web Socket for push notifications. Not he best way of going about it, but hey, it exists.

      • Joe Cool@lemmy.ml
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        10 months ago

        SimpleX is very neat. But it cannot do multiple devices unless you count shutting down, exporting database to new device replacing existing database as a sensible workflow. Using the database on two devices at once will break encryption and cause all sorts of weird problems.

    • smileyhead@discuss.tchncs.de
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      10 months ago

      Signal encryption can be taken out of the app and applied elsewhere, because it has been already done. SimpleX is nice but this is single app single implementation thing.

      • Piece_Maker@feddit.uk
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        10 months ago

        So I [in theory, I don’t know how to start with this on a technical level] could make a third-party Signal-compatible app, but allow it to connect to Whatsapp instead of Signal? Even if I can’t use my Signal account to contact Whatsapp people, that’s still potentially useful. Although I imagine the terms I’d have to agree to to do so would be full of nonsense that stops this being remotely feasible.

        • noodlejetski@lemm.ee
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          10 months ago

          could make a third-party Signal-compatible app, but allow it to connect to Whatsapp instead of Signal?

          you’d have to create a messaging service, not just a client.

          • Piece_Maker@feddit.uk
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            10 months ago

            I guess I’m misunderstanding here - I thought Whatsapp would be the “service” in my case, I’m just making a client to hook into their, presumably open [to people who agree to whatever their terms are] API. So it’s more of a federation thing between services?

            • noodlejetski@lemm.ee
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              10 months ago

              So it’s more of a federation thing between services?

              yeah, I guess you could call it that.

  • onlinepersona@programming.dev
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    10 months ago

    Meta says that it will only allow third-party developers to use another protocol besides Signal, “if they are able to demonstrate it offers the same security guarantees as Signal.”

    If matrix finally finishes implementing MLS, maybe they could convince meta to use it.

    CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

    • 4dpuzzle@beehaw.org
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      10 months ago

      Last time they touched an open chat protocol, they hung it out to dry. That was XMPP. That’s why more than half of the fediverse is reluctant or outright hostile to federate with anything meta.

      • AMDIsOurLord@lemmy.ml
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        10 months ago

        XMPP is used in many, many places. It’s just not usually explicitly known that the backend is using that protocol

        • 4dpuzzle@beehaw.org
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          10 months ago

          You are underplaying the damage Google and FB did to XMPP. It wasn’t supposed to be relegated to an obscure backend protocol. The involvement of those companies ensured that it didn’t become a popular user-facing protocol.

  • Kir@feddit.it
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    10 months ago

    Would this mean I could finally ditch what’s app and use only Signal?

        • anlumo@feddit.de
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          10 months ago

          Yeah, this worked so well for XMPP when everybody federated with Gmail chat.

          • Avid Amoeba@lemmy.ca
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            10 months ago

            There’s even less privacy if I have to have the WhatsApp app installed on my phone to send that message.

          • InfiniWheel@lemmy.one
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            10 months ago

            You have the big plus of not having the WhatsApp app installed and snooping around with all those permissions it has.

          • n2burns@lemmy.ca
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            10 months ago

            Would it not be E2EE? Isn’t that one of the reasons for using the Signal protocol?

            • muhyb@programming.dev
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              10 months ago

              Yes, the “delivering” part would be E2EE. Do we really know the afterwards if they can read their users’ messages? They probably can.

              • falsemirror@beehaw.org
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                10 months ago

                Whatsapp CANNOT read messages when e2ee is enabled, this client-side snooping was discussed when the protocol was first implemented. Whatsapp collects a ton of metadata and social graph info, but not message content.

                • blackstrat@lemmy.fwgx.uk
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                  10 months ago

                  Well you type messages in in plain text and they decrypt it to show you the messages at the other end. So they can do the nefarious processing on the client side and send back results to the mother ship. E2EE is only good when you trust the two ends, but with WhatsApp and Messenger you shouldn’t trust the ends.

              • n2burns@lemmy.ca
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                10 months ago

                Sure, but any messaging app (including Signal) could have these backdoors in place. Heck, there’s even vectors for unrelated apps on your phone to read this data once unencrypted.

                • muhyb@programming.dev
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                  10 months ago

                  That’s actually true. We don’t know the real-time server code of Signal. Though other apps cannot read what’s written inside Signal, that’s the good part. I prefer private server + Matrix but Signal is the easiest for regular people.

            • authorinthedark@lemmy.sdf.org
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              10 months ago

              if i remember correctly, it would be E2EE (WhatsApp and Messenger are too) but Meta stores the encrypted message on their server

          • ViciousTurducken@lemmy.one
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            10 months ago

            Them being nonprofit has nothing to do with the pursuit of marketshare. Plenty of nonprofits want to maximize marketshare. Them being nonprofit means they are mission-driven.

            And what is that mission?

            Per the Signal Foundation’s website:

            Protect free expression and enable secure global communication through open source privacy technology.

            • helenslunch@feddit.nl
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              10 months ago

              Them being nonprofit has nothing to do with the pursuit of marketshare.

              Um, of course it does? LOL

              Them being nonprofit means they are mission-driven.

              And what is that mission?

              Let’s talk about what the opposite of their mission is: Mainly operating as a source of data collection and revenue for a corporate surveillance and advertising agency.

              Do they want more users? Sure. Are they going to compromise on their core principles out of convenience for their users? Abso-fuckin-lutely not.

              There’s also the opposite to consider: that users would decide to use WhatsApp instead of Signal because they can, which then puts you in the uncomfortable position I find myself in often where I have to tell people I’m not accepting their messages from insecure platforms.

    • spdrmx@beehaw.org
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      10 months ago

      Not if signal doesn’t want to support WhatsApp, and I don’t think they’re going to unfortunately :(

    • penquin@lemm.ee
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      10 months ago

      I’ve read somewhere that iMessage wasn’t considered “big enough” to be considerate a monopoly. Which is bullshit if you ask me.

      • PonyOfWar@pawb.social
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        10 months ago

        Kinda true in Europe though. Don’t know anyone who uses iMessage, it’s pretty much irrelevant. I know the situation in the US is quite different, but ultimately they don’t regulate for the US market.

      • InfiniWheel@lemmy.one
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        10 months ago

        Its only big in the US, most of the planet only sees iMessage as that borderline useless app Apple bundles in their phones.

        • penquin@lemm.ee
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          10 months ago

          It’s annoying as fuck when I message my wife a video of our kids, it looks like dog shit on her iPhone. I have to instead send it on Whatsapp or signal. I hate apple

          • JackGreenEarth@lemm.ee
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            10 months ago

            That’s because you’re using SMS, that’s not the fault of the messaging app. Using a third party messaging app is the correct way to go, it’s encrypted, supports group chats, and bigger messages.

            • Skull giver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl
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              10 months ago

              So does iMessage, to be fair. The problem is that Apple decided not build clients for alternative platforms, but the app itself is quite competent.

              Hopefully Apple can convince the telco people to implement E2EE in RCS (though good luck getting that through with wiretap laws all around the world, lol) so there’s some kind of cross-platform standard here. Apple is going to implement RCS to save Americans from blurry videos at the very least, but it won’t add Google’s proprietary encryption standard.

              • JackGreenEarth@lemm.ee
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                10 months ago

                Hopefully not RCS, but maybe Matrix or the Signal protocol, as RCS is entirely controlled by Google and there aren’t any FOSS clients.

                • Skull giver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl
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                  10 months ago

                  RCS is controlled by GSMA, not Google. I’m sure they’ll welcome Google’s extensions, but Google doesn’t get to decide.

                  Google can try to do the same thing they did to XMPP, but then they get the same “Androids don’t receive our pictures” problem that’s driving teenagers to buy iOS in the USA in the first place.

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        10 months ago

        I don’t think it’s ever happened to me that anyone told me that it was inconvenient for them that I didn’t have iMessage, compared to pretty much weekly exclamations of “But why can’t you just use WhatsApp like everyone else!?”

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        10 months ago

        Apple would still feel pressure to add interoperability if all other big players do. iMessage would have a competitive disadvantage if it’s the only one where users are unable to message the rest of the world.

          • Hirom@beehaw.org
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            10 months ago

            Yes. Still, it would be harder to not give a f if others walled gardens open up, and iMessage get disadvantaged by that wall.

            It’s as if iPhones were only able to make calls to other iPhones. Whereas all other devices where able to make calls to any device from any other vendor.