Personally I'd rather avoid the feature bloat. I also think it just waters-down the "secure" image they are clearly going for. I mean, broadcasting images to your contact list isn't exactly what I think of when I think "private messaging".
The cool stuff about Signal is what happens under the hood. They don't want a special identity as a "private messenger"; they believe all messaging should be secure.
Getting that backup off the device is yet another manual process for most users they need to think about.
Compare this to Telegram: user doesn't have to do anything.
Compare this to iMessage: user doesn't have to do anything.
Compare this to WhatsApp: user just needs to click agree.
The last two even save backups in an E2E encrypted fashion unreadable by servers.
In any case, I actually prefer it the way Signal does because
1) I don't have to sign up for / rely on a cloud provider,
2) if need be, I can decrypt the backup on my own and export it to some other format.
> then they only do backup manually
Wrong. The backup can be done automatically (i.e. every day).
You might say 'but they don't want to make people less secure, people will get the wrong idea!' But they do this already, in ways that are much worse than allowing the user to make a security decision for themselves.
You can change a setting to prevent screenshots inside the Signal phone app, so you can't take screenshots. Your conversations are now secure, right? Nobody can take pictures of your disappearing messages! WRONG. You can turn on that feature and I can still take screenshots all day, including disappearing messages that you send to me.
Likewise, Signal can't tell if you're downloading pictures or copying text I send to you. You could be backing up everything - my only 'assurance' is that you probably aren't doing it because it's inconvenient.
You can change disappearing messages timer to anything you want! Great! But the change of timer is itself a message. So if we are arrested and police get into one person's Signal, they can see when disappearing messages were turned on and when the timer was lengthened or shortened. Sure, the messages disappeared, but what were you doing on August 23rd at 7:39pm that made you change the timer to 10 minute4s for 3 hours? We know where you were because of your phone's IMEI, I guess we will tell the court that you were trying to cover something up during those 3 hours and charge you with obstruction of justice.
I have asked them to change the latter behavior repeatedly, explaining why it could be a problem for users, and all I ever hear is 'good point, we'll look into it' even though there's no reason that information should be stored.
Your latter example is also a security concern they can’t address. A jurisdiction that allows a message about a settings change being used as a basis for obstruction of justice can rule the use of signal as the same (though I do agree that former is problematic on its face).
I dont know the ins and outs of the problems with backups, but it doesn’t take a phd in cryptography to envision a case where your settings about backups open all your contacts to automated dragnet surveillance. In that case it doesn’t make sense for a single user to downgrade everyone else’s security settings.
The disappearing message timer history could absolutely be mitigated by simply not retaining that information or timestamping it.
If you could export/back up single conversations, you would have much more granularity than exporting or backing up your entire message database. Other people could also get a message that the conversation had been exported. there are lots of cases where you might want to do this by mutual agreement, but it isn't possible.
C'mon, don't bs us :)
Example: I am running out of space on my phone. I look, and see Signal is taking 4gb of space. But I would like to preserve a lot of that media. So I buy a mini-SD card and install it in my phone. Yay! Now to turn on Signal chat backups!
Oh, but the backups are hardcoded to a location on your primary storage that you can't change. so even though I have 126gb of free space on the SD card I installed, I can't back Signal up to it and I am still running out of space.
My only option is to try removing every other app I have installed, and hope there is enough space reclaimed to perform a backup, which I can then copy off my system so I can reinstall my apps...WTF.
Meanwhile there is no way to back up a single chat. You can archive it, but that just removes it from your Signal home screen, it doesn't actually create an archive of any kind. And there is no way to back anything up on desktop.
This isn't a feature, it's an antipattern.
Backing up to the same device on which are running out of space is an extremely obvious problem, to which the solution is to just ask the user where they want the backup stored instead of deciding for them.
In the beginning, it might have been an oversight. Now moxie is just making seriously misleading arguments on behalf of people he doesn't know to make their service worse.
What are you referring to? An option to choose your backup location got added two years ago. It works on Android 10 and above.
https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/commit/ee3d7a9a3...
This means:
* Backup must be automatic.
* Backup must be done off device.
* Backup must be common enough that messages aren't lost.
* Restore must be available to person of average technical ability.
* Restore must not require a person to remember typing in a 20+ character pregenerated number they probably lost in last 2 years of having Setup signal.
This is the bar other messaging apps have set.
It's also funny how demanding on use of phone numbers, shoving in crypto currency and demanding everyone to use out-of-date Electron app is somehow fine, but making backups user friendly is suddenly a massive "security" issue.
This is the BS security theater I despise at Signal. It's the software equivalent of having every single airplane passenger take off shoes.
That's probably your answer. I don't know anyone who uses a mini-SD card. The last time I bought a phone no phone I considered had an SD slot.
Nobody was asking for stickers, stories, or crypto. Those things aren't cool.
Ultimately there was no shortage of boring, cryptographically-secure apps. Signal is filling demand for an app that is both secure and fun to use.
I've tried snapchat and Instagram stories, and I hate that the messages disappear with time. It seems counter-intuitive for an asynchronous communication method, and that doesn't even count how it always feels like another FOMO marketing gag to keep you engaged with the app.
Just let people delete posts (and really delete them to boot).
Of course it still has all the usual social media failings where it is used to make the senders life seem more exciting and fun than it really is but I see the point of having the option.
I especially like signal’s groups implementation. I have a couple of large group chats where I am happy to share my day with people but it’s not important enough to notify everyone’s phone and it doesn’t matter if they miss it.
See - that's the part I don't get. Photos, to me, are not ephemeral. They are valuable, even if you don't think they are at the time. I've lost too many photos because I considered them to be ephemeral, and I regret that loss because I now only have vague memories of the events they captured. My only remaining memories of some of my oldest friends who are no longer with me are captured in those "irrelevant" photos.
Future you will thank you for keeping photos of your friends.
Neither was signal taking your contact list and uploading a copy along with your name and photo and storing that data forever in the cloud. Neither was refusing to update their privacy policy to reflect their new data collection practices. A company that promotes itself to whistleblowers and human rights activists and then lies to them about what data they collect and keep is highly unethical.
None of this inspires confidence in Signal as a private/secure messaging service. I've moved away from it. I wish them luck as a social media platform.
It seems incomplete to not mention that that data is end‐to‐end encrypted, and that name and photo are optional.