this post was submitted on 07 Feb 2025
175 points (97.8% liked)
Technology
61825 readers
3055 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I don't think that's a fair comparison, simply because their structures are quite different. Signal is FOSS run by a 501(c)3 non-profit, whereas Whatsapp is obviously run by Meta and data mines its users; Telegram is also a nonprofit, but privacy was never their goal or mission.
They're all centralized, which I agree is a negative, but if something must be centralized, being run by a nonprofit foundation whose mission is privacy and E2EE is about the best option you could hope for in that scenario.
Like openai and proton?
We are still in a trust me bro situation... We just trust signal bro more than meta bro.
Sorta like those. Anybody that thought OpenAI was trustworthy just by virtue of being a nonprofit gets what they deserve for being so credulous, and Proton isn't directly comparable, because it's a stack of software, not just one. You would have to compare the analog of Signal, and Proton doesn't have one.
If what you really want to say is that we don't know with 100% certainty that the Signal Foundation is operating in good faith, then I agree, though they seem to have a pretty decent track record thus far.
However, that doesn't mean their software doesn't do what is expected (it's FOSS, go inspect and build it yourself), and E2EE ensures that even if they suddenly wanted or were ordered to turn anything over, the data LEOs get would be limited, if it exists at all.
I'm not sure what you think is especially noteworthy here. It's always some level of a "trust me bro" situation. That's how the internet works. If you want to avoid trust issues, stop using the internet.