Hacker News Reader

Comment by arjie | Hacker News Reader

Personally, I only want to send messages regarding harmless stuff. Being able to send my location in-line (or even share live like WeChat) is a feature I'd drop any privacy protection for.

On top of that, I'm not going to get my parents to switch to the messaging app du jour. I'm going to hope that the one I use adopts good technology.

Maybe Signal is awesome. But privacy from law enforcement is not a killer feature. The US Government has substantial leverage over me in other ways. If it's come to the point that they want my communications, I've already lost.

View on HN

This is why the Signal team spends time working with other messengers. We want to help enable Signal Protocol in the products that everyone is already using (like WhatsApp), rather than expecting everyone to switch to our app.

And thank you for that.

> Maybe Signal is awesome. But privacy from law enforcement is not a killer feature. The US Government has substantial leverage over me in other ways.

What about the UK government? The GCHQ is one of the most aggressive and sophisticated signals intelligence agencies in the world.

What about the RU government? Or the Chinese government?

The reason most security folks speak of "nation state actors" in aggregate isn't to be euphemistic (initials: NSA), it's because "the only threat you might encounter online is your local government" isn't necessarily true.

To be clear, I don't want to turn this into a political discussion. I just wanted to point out that the scope is wider than your comment implied.

This is true, but what are they going to do to me? The threat is not clear to me.

I guess there is no point in arguing if you think this way. Paraphrasing Edward Snowden, if you don't work to protect privacy because the threat to YOU is not clear, you shouldn't work to protect free speech if you're not the one being silenced.

A big problem is that the threat to you exists, but is subtle: society gets worse when we allow this to happen to all those people that we would consider heroes years in the future but are deemed (sometimes by the letter of the law, sometimes not) criminals right now. Conformity for the forest by pruning the trees.

That's a fair argument.

The bit about the free speech is a bit of a tangent, seeing as I can reasonably pick my battles, but the rest is fair.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com