Have you changed the image quality settings in the app to "High" - I see no mention of that in your blog post.

> Signal doesn’t let me donate Mobilecoin from the wallet right inside Signal. What’s the point of having a payments feature if I can’t use it to pay you?

"Grift for thee, but not for me"

It's important for Signal groups, because on a new device without a backup the groups you were in don't show up until someone sends a message in the group. Say if you were the only admin in an announcement-only group, no one else can send a message in the group, so that group is now lost to you.

I like this idea, but I don't think I'd ever be able to convince my wife to run that analysis on any particular message before she decides whether to email or to message me on Signal.

so do you email yourself messages/conversations you want to keep?

Also unless everyone use gpg, email isn't very secure nor confidential.

I tend to use notes on my smartphone for information I want to keep that are encrypted and synchronized on my desktop when reaching home. Having said that I often forget to copy a message to a note because it is a manual process and it is sometimes not trivial to anticipate that an info will be important enough in the future that you need it again.

You can imagine even the same person having some conversations they would want to keep and some they wouldn't.

Meanwhile in Norway, of 520 phone contacts (of which many are things like cabs, restaurants, realtor from way back when) – 83 are on signal. And it's not like I have particularly privacy-conscious friends, that I know of.

Be the change you want to see in this world.

nobody has access to your phone number from your account, and when subpoenad they are unable to provide it:https://signal.org/bigbrother/

'the point' is spam protection, alas

This is the number one thing that is missing IMHO. I would gladly take it over back up options

Ok smarty-pants. Explain exactly how the encrypted cloud backup leaks to NSA when the key to decrypt it sits on your device and safe alone?

Absolutely the right security trade-off for Signal users. Anything else would devalue the entire product.

Whatsapp chose a different approach (which is reasonable for their user base) but that means that there is an escrow key. Regardless of your choices, messages that you sent may end up "end to end encrypted" but in reality stored in the cloud with a key escrowed to Meta...

The backup feature seems to be opt-in, i.e. the requirement to write the key down won't be too surprising.

The implementation feels uncharacteristically crude for Signal. Instead of seamless protections, you just get handed 64 characters you’re told to “store securely.” That’s not realistic: most people will screenshot it, and those screenshots will end up in unencrypted cloud backups.

when you're shown the code, it has 2 buttons: copy to clipboard and save to password manager. if you choose password manager you should be relatively safe...

It's this way, or it's not encrypted. The whole premise of their privacy model requires this.

Signal opens themselves up to government coercion and ruined reputation otherwise.

there are more than a few backup providers that do this security trade off with user acceptance of the risk. if this trade off isn't good for the user, they can use any other number of insecure backups.

If you're using Signal, of all things, that's probably a reasonable security/usability trade off.

Granted, I'm sure there are a lot of people out there who just use Signal because one of their more security-conscious friends/family members told them to install it, and so you're probably right for those people.

But, frankly, I can't see how else they could do it. Offering an unencrypted option, or weakening the encryption (by storing a copy of the key on Signal's servers) would make Signal not Signal.

If they were able to recover backups for you, then it wouldn't be secure. Right trade-off.