Privacy

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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

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Signal Is More Than Encrypted Messaging. Under Meredith Whittaker, It’s Out to Prove Surveillance Capitalism Wrong (www.wired.com)

submitted 3 weeks ago by minnix@lemux.minnix.dev to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

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https://ghostarchive.org/archive/0QgXq

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[–] MerchantsOfMisery@lemmy.ml 6 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Every app from the Play store requires GCM though, and Signal functions even if a user disables GCM. It pertains to a phone's ability to notify a user of a new message. But again, users can disable GCM and the app itself will continue to work just fine.

For what it's work, the APK on Signal's website (obviously) doesn't have the external Google dependencies. Personally, I really don't see this as an issue at all.

[–] poVoq 8 points 3 weeks ago

There is also Google maps integration. Sure, it's not mandatory anymore, but if you install the official Signal app on a phone with Google play services installed, you are effectively not running an open-source app anymore and this potential backdoor is also not noticeable with reproducible builds.

F-droid has strict rules in place to prevent these sort of things for good reasons, thus the original comment is not entirely wrong in saying that an app that claims to be open-source, but can't be made available on F-droid is a red-flag.