> > Signal was used by Chinese dissidents and were whisked away by the CCP. The most likely proposed method was that the GBoard (google soft-keyboard) was "updated" with a poison update that uploaded everything typed. What defenses does Signal have against that? And will Signal warn against unverified GBoard updates that haven't been vetted?
> If you can't trust your OS then you've lost already. This complaint is also fun considering the number of people who yell about banks doing things like refusing to run if nonstandard keyboards are installed.
There are also open source and 3rd party repos (F-Droid) that could provide properly vetted soft keyboards. And I'd also mention that Signal is not available on F-Droid or Guardian Project's repo.
And Signal can also run basic checks for sanity of the system, and loudly warn if things aren't as the application expects.
> > Signal still demands your phone# to make an account. This by itself is unconscionable for an application that purports to be for security and privacy.
> The alternative appears to be "Signal knows which users you have communicated with", which is much worse. All sorts of interesting things can be obtained from the communication graph.
All of the encrypted comms goes through their servers. They also prevent others from running federated Signal servers. That would lead that they have access to both who, where (ip address), how long (by length of encrypted data), and with whom.
The same metadata was/is the basis of the NSA's spy projects. Metadata is just as important as the very content.