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 🤷‍♂️

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.

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.