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Comment by tbodt | Hacker News Reader

Which site guideline does this break?

The comment was edited after I replied to it—in fact it was basically rewritten. If it had been written that way in the first place, of course I wouldn't have replied.

To be more clear. I removed one sentence. That was: > WhatsApp doesn’t sell ads too. And there was this question. > If my data belongs in my hands, why they own the servers and the only one who takes design decisions for backend side are they?

Please be specific and remove ambiguity when you moderate, otherwise your point seems subjective and is misleading.

Plus I believe everyone in this site can freely express their thoughts without attacking anyone. With that in mind I don’t see any wrongdoing with previous version of parent comment, I just edited my comment to be specific.

When I replied to you above, your comment began with "That's ridiculous", which is just the sort of thing that we ask people not to do in comments here. From https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html:

When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."

That's mainly what I was responding to, though there were some smaller things that you also edited. However, what matters most is that the form you edited it into is really good, and if you comment in that way going forward, everything will be better.

> When I replied to you above, your comment began with "That's ridiculous", which is just the sort of thing that we ask people not to do in comments here.

Lol, yes I recalled from my memory, that I forgot as well as slight edits, sorry. I agree and admit that it is not polite.

I appreciate your elaboration.

Not dang but probably

> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize.

lol i have no idea what to with that in this context.

When Signal says your data belongs in your hands, they are referencing the end to end encryption in the app, which means that any of your data that goes through their servers is encrypted and can't be read by them. This can be verified by people partaking in a Signal message through the use of their safety numbers and through building the app from their published source that you can verify only ever sends your encrypted data to Signal servers. It's true that we can never be sure what's in Signal's backend but we can also prove that anything we send to their backend can't be read by them regardless of its design.

Your data is not limited to your messages. Who do you talk to, how many times, when, where, your social graph, when you go online, how frequently you are online, what avatar you have etc. etc.

And remember you are authorizing yourself with your number, which is for most people is valid identifying point, and can be used to trace back to individuals.

While Signal claims phone numbers are hashed and never used for any real identification purposes and whatsoever, I think this is still very questionable. They could easily design the system to allow one to authorize with username from the beginning.

I don't wanna go into much details, but I personally will never take anything Signal tells for granted for two main reasons, first it's centralized (it's doesn't matter if it's owned by non-profit organization), second it's operated in the USA, meaning they are bound to cooperate with intelligence agencies when they have to.

You edited your GP comment after I replied to it, to remove the place where you had broken the site guidelines. Sometimes people do that to make the mods look bad, but I'm going to assume you didn't do it for that reason. Please don't do it again, or at least not without explaining to the reader that you did. That holds whether the other commenter is a mod or not. It's just good manners.

Also, please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait to HN (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25696652). We're trying for something different on this site, especially now.

My bad. I edited my comment. Nothing intentionally, just realized my comment was not actually appropriate for the context.

Regarding your second point, I agree it was not substantive, noted.

Appreciated!

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