A reminder that your phone number is metadata. And people who think metadata is “just” data or that cross-referencing is some kind of sci-fi nonsense, are fundamentally misunderstanding how modern surveillance works.

By requiring phone numbers, Signal, despite its good encryption, inherently builds a social graph. The server operators, or anyone who gets that data, can see a map of who is talking to whom. The content is secure, but the connections are not.

Being able to map out who talks to whom is incredibly valuable. A three-letter agency can take the map of connections and overlay it with all the other data they vacuum up from other sources, such as location data, purchase histories, social media activity. If you become a “person of interest” for any reason, they instantly have your entire social circle mapped out.

Worse, the act of seeking out encrypted communication is itself a red flag. It’s a perfect filter: “Show me everyone paranoid enough to use crypto.” You’re basically raising your hand.

So, in a twisted way, Signal being a tool for private conversations, makes it a perfect machine for mapping associations and identifying targets. The fact that it operates using a centralized server located in the US should worry people far more than it seems to.

The kicker is that thanks to gag orders, companies are legally forbidden from telling you if the feds come knocking for this data. So even if Signal’s intentions are pure, we’d never know how the data it collects is being used. The potential for abuse is baked right into the phone-number requirement.

Thing is that there are actual privacy respecting messaging apps like SimpleX Chat. Signal isn’t one of them. It’s run by people associated with US intelligence, it’s hosted on a single server based in the US, and it actively harvests phone numbers. It’s incredible that people look at this and still claim it’s a private messaging app.

We’ll see how it goes, the US might just descend into a civil war scenario at this point.

I guess we’ll see, but I do think people will start adapting to their new reality out of necessity.

I really think it’ll depend on how bad the employment situation gets. At some point people are going to start realizing they’re not temporarily inconvenienced billionaires, and that their interests aren’t aligned with the oligarchs. Software devs have been largely insulated from general economic problems until recently. Getting a job has been relatively easy, the pay was way above what most people make, and that fed individualistic behavior. Now that jobs are becoming scarce, and there’s a huge pool of laid off workers, people are starting to get concerned.

wonder when software devs will get serious about unionizing

exactly

basically, large capitalists will buy up the assets from failed companies and make bank

I used LineageOs before, but GrapheneOS now.

Israel using nukes is a very plausible scenario. There’s a great interview with Postol that I can highly recommend if you haven’t watched it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbQI_IYz6uM

I imagine what got them worried was that they saw that they couldn’t control the narrative anymore. If this was happening 20 years ago, we wouldn’t even know there was a genocide happening in Gaza. The news wouldn’t cover it, we’d be told that Palestinians are eating babies, and heroic Israel is defending our glorious western civilization against these savages who are attacking it completely unprovoked. But that doesn’t work when Israeli atrocities are being live streamed to everyone’s phones. All of a sudden people start asking questions, and that puts traditional media in a bind. If they keep ignoring it they become completely discredited, and if they start. covering it, then it confirms what people are seeing.

So now they’re going after all the alternative channels to shut them down and make sure that you only get sanitized information that doesn’t challenge the official narrative.

an app designed to harvest phone numbers isn’t a privacy tool lmfao

nice thanks!

yeah same here, the whole thing is incredibly relatable

Ah, I never read the book. Sounds like it could be entertaining.

cry harder

still entertaining, and does describe how large corps work internally fairly accurately based on my experience

so brave

I was complaining about copilot specifically, which is an embarrassingly terrible product

those are not normal salaries for people working on regular open source projects though