Comment by Legogris | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Legogris | Hacker News Reader

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As much as I agree with your criticism of Signal (my main gripe is enforcing use and verification of phone numbers as identifiers), Telegram is not privacy-focused, despite their marketing and public perception.

* Messages are cleartext w.r.t. the server by default (I'd wager >99.9% of all Telegram chats are sent this way). E2E-encrypted conversations have to be enabled explicitly, are tied to a single device and only available on mobile.

* Encrypted group-chat not possible.

Hell, you might as well use Google or Facebook, the only difference is who's monitoring. Even WhatsApp has more privacy than Telegram.

Of what I tried so far, Keybase is really damn close. Their UX has been improving a lot, multi-device where all are first-class citizens, E2E by default, etc etc. The whole identity-graph thing, server-side being closed source and platform being run by a US-based business are the only things that keep me from trying to onboard everyone I keep in regular touch with. Too bad neither of those things are likely to change anytime soon.

Phone numbers are every message board person's gripe with Signal, and it's a totally understandable gripe. But Signal doesn't demand a phone number because they want your personal information, but rather because they're allergic to it: to run a messaging system, you have to provide users with contact lists, and the way all other services do that is to store contact lists in serverside databases. That means that other messaging applications store the complete contact graph of the service --- literally a log of precisely who talks to whom --- in plaintext, in a single centralized location. Signal avoids doing that by piggybacking on the contact list you already have, and so doesn't have to store a contact graph at all. It's a UX sacrifice Signal makes in favor of superior privacy and security; UX sacrifices for security are basically Signal's brand.

I don't buy it. They could have kept it the default but allowing e-mail as an alternative (which can also be stored in phone's contact lists).

Or just have usernames, for that matter. It's not like they're a 5 person bootstrapping team who don't have the resources to solve the small kinks to make that user-friendly.

It's not hard to build serverside contact lists with usernames; 1-person teams routinely build that feature. But all of those systems store plaintext complete contact graphs serverside. If it's so easy to get this feature with email addresses, why does Wire have a durable log of who's talked to whom on their service stored in a database? It's not because they want it.

For piggybacking on the local devices' contacts: What makes e-mails different than phone numbers?

For app-specific contacts: They can store and sync conversation logs. I don't see how contact lists would be harder.

The fact that most people don't have email addresses for all their contacts? The application has to work for most people, not you.

I still don't see how these have to be mutually exclusive. Fine, default to phone number since that's what most people are comfortable with, but it's not like there's anything inherent making supporting alternative identifiers a difficult problem.

Let it be my problem making my friends add my e-mail address to their contacts.

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