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Comment by jwr | Hacker News Reader

> It's really difficult to build a useable security product, and Signal has done it successfully.

I'd argue it hasn't. Signal still has no way of backing up your chat history (with photos, etc). Lose your phone and it's all gone forever. The PIN that the app annoyingly tells you to set up does not serve as an encryption key for your backups. There are no backups.

Once again, if your phone dies (this happened to me recently), all your data in Signal is gone forever. And there is no way to prevent that.

In this day and age, I consider this unacceptable. That is not a "useable security product".

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> I consider this unacceptable.

On the other hand, I consider this a feature.

I'm not saying you are wrong, but I am saying different people have different ideas and requirements about how they want things like this to work.

For me, most of my Signal chats have disappearing messages enabled, to intentionally ensure there is no long term archive of conversations (assuming you trust the other people to not be screenshotting everything). It gets you into the habit of storing message that may be useful later (mostly for me stuff like event details or addresses), with the benefit of making everybody in the conversation a little more inclined to treat it all as ephemeral and be somewhat more candid then you might be in SMS or email. Not _quite_ as candid as face to face in private, but closer.

There's a widely used and agreed on signal for most of my group chats, where setting disappearing messages to 5 minutes is understood to mean "juicy gossip or legal grey area chat is about to follow" and setting it back to 8 hours or 1 week means "OK, we're done with that discussion, back to regular chat".

> different people have different ideas and requirements about how they want things like this to work

Agreed. But I can't convince people and family to use Signal if I know that one day they will inevitably lose the pictures of their loved ones. Because that's how most people use communicator apps.

Let me show you this picture of my grandson....

opens Signal, scrolls for weeks

You could show them where the Save button is — that's how "most" people use messaging apps. Even "friends and family".

Signal on my Android phone makes an encrypted backup every day, this includes photos and I can copy the file off my phone if I desire (plus I point the backups to my microsd card which should still be good if the phone dies).

Run the desktop client on a Pi in a VNC session at home and automatically receive the identical messages - no problem!

Not a proper solution but a hacky workaround possibility.

"Data in Signal" isn't a thing.

Save messages and media you want to keep outside of your encrypted chats...

Those are features.

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