Do you have details on this? Given that usernames just came out, I don’t expect they’re storing many of them, but I’m interested in specifically a source for “a list of everyone you have contacted with signal”
This has been true for many years now. At the time it caused a major uproar among the userbase (myself included) whose concerns were almost entirely ignored. Their misleading communication at the time caused a lot of confusion, but if you didn't know that Signal was collecting this data that should tell you everything you need to know about how trustworthy they are.
Note that the "solution" of disabling pins mentioned at the end of that last article was later shown to not prevent the collection and storage of user data. It was just giving users a false sense of security. To this day there is no way to opt out of the data collection.
My personal feeling is that Signal is compromised and the fact that the very first sentence of their privacy policy is a lie and they refuse to update it to detail their new data collection is a big fat dead canary warning people to find a new solution for secured communication. Other very questionable Signal moves that make me wonder if it wasn't an effort to drive people away from the platform as loudly as they were allowed to include the killing off of one of the most popular features (the ability to get both secured messages and insecure SMS/MMS in the same app) and the introduction of weird crypto shit nobody was asking for.
I was a user and a fan. Spent years recommending Signal to others. People are pretty used to software turning to shit but it still sucks to have to reach out to tell people they should look for alternatives to the software I'd once recommended to them.
I swear if VLC ever turns evil I'm giving up on recommending software forever (in the meantime, check out VLC if you haven't already!).
> I was a user and a fan. Spent years recommending Signal to others.
I don’t blame you, I think it did start with a good promise initially, but I believe just like anything centralized that turns big, it will become evil.
> in the meantime, check out VLC if you haven't already!
The player? Or is that a new messaging app? For messaging I usually use Matrix/simpleX/Session.
Even before they added all the data collection and cloud storage 'sealed sender' didn't do much to protect users.
"Even under the sealed sender, observers said, Signal will continue to map senders' IP addresses. That information, combined with recipient IDs and message times, means that Signal continues to leave a wake of potentially sensitive metadata. Still, by removing the "from" information from the outside of Signal messages, the service is incrementally raising the bar." (https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/10/new-s...)
A couple years after that "incremental" improvement Signal started keeping everything forever in the cloud which means that today governments can get a signal user's information just by brute forcing a PIN
