It has been a long journey.

I have been gradually convincing my family, close relatives and friends to make the switch to Signal for over two years. I am already the “tech support guy” in all my circles so most didn’t really question it. Most of my friends are quite tech-savvy, and some even did use Signal before I talked to them about it.

This also filtered out some “friends” who were never that close to me to begin with. So, that’s a bonus, I guess.

Overall, my recommendation to others interested would be to tell people how much you don’t like Meta’s business model instead of the privacy aspect. I already ditched Facebook and Instagram many years ago, and this helped defend my point a bit better.

  • AnUnassumingStick@lemmy.ml
    53·
    5 hours ago

    Lucky, my social circle’s technologically illiterate AND doesn’t care what happens to their personal data so I’m stuck with both Facebook & WhatsApp :/ One saving grace is that I don’t have either installed on my “main” phone.

    Signal’s not great for privacy either tbf - Meta is just a very very low bar to be better than.

      • AnUnassumingStick@lemmy.ml
        4·
        3 hours ago

        What I currently have for privacy is SimpleX - not needing a phone number alone beats Signal - but I’ve also got only a single contact there so it’s not replacing WhatsApp anytime soon 🤷‍♂️

    • AcornTickler@sh.itjust.worksOP
      6·
      4 hours ago

      Signal’s not great for privacy either tbf

      Why do you think so? Yeah, it is not anonymous due to requiring a phone number, but all media and metadata are end-to-end encrypted.

      • AnUnassumingStick@lemmy.ml
        3·
        3 hours ago

        Ended up having to do some more digging on Signal as I was under the impression more metadata was getting left unencrypted than there is.

        My bigger concerns are with whom Signal employs and the very questionable decisions the company’s made.

        Their VP of engineering was at Facebook managing Onavo VPN when that was spying on teenagers using Snapshat. Then, Signal had known their desktop encryption keys were stored in plaintext for six years and only fixed it after public outrage.

        To the best of everyone’s knowledge, Signal’s netcode is solid, but leadership with a history in privacy scandals & negligence towards clear privacy holes is very iffy IMO.