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Comment by ngngngng | Hacker News Reader

While we're on the subject, is Signal still the best way for me to communicate privately? I've got all the people I communicate with daily using it now, and I feel relatively confident that the communications are private. Are they?

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Open Whisper Systems has one of the most secure messaging services on the planet. The US military is rumored to have been telling operatives to use it instead of text on their government phones[1].

Edit: a word

[1] https://www.militarytimes.com/flashpoints/2020/01/23/deploye...

Given their demand to your phone number, along with social graph (phone list and communication targets) I do not trust it to be secure and private.

It's probably secure against phone company snooping. But I wouldn't trust it much past that.

Wire.com E2E encryption does not require phone number or social graph. They are also working to standardize the wire protocol via IETF MLS, with cryptographers from multiple companies.

https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/mls/about/

Indeed.

I haven't gotten around to using Wire. But when I've needed secure, private, and semianonymous messaging, I've used Tox.

OWS is working on foundations to allow people to use usernames and link them with FCM / push notifications without the central signal server being any wiser than currently with just phone numbers.

My hope is to be able to add ephemeral user ids so to my work folks I'm JustMe but family folks I'm FamilyMe and internet blog readers I'm MyProfessionalMe

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