Well, the people who wrote Signal and run its infrastructure care about their users’ security only as far as it suits them. So that’s, perhaps, good, right? Lots of people were driven to Signal which is ever so much more secure and written and run by very nice people who understand and care about security. WhatsApp / Facebook were so alarmed by this that they’ve both issued a number of clarifications, delayed the implementation date until the 15th of May - probably in the hope that people will have forgotten by then - and made clear that the changes do not apply in Europe, where there are reasonable privacy laws, and not even, yet, in the UK which has not yet completed its transition to Boris Johnson’s hereditary feudal fiefdom.
People are apparently leaving WhatsApp in droves, and moving to Signal and other platforms.
I’m glad to say this seems to have been a disaster for WhatsApp: so many users changed to Signal - an app which sells itself as being more secure - that it fell over under the load for a while on the 15th of January. These terms of service were at best confusing, but given that WhatsApp is owned by Facebook, a company whose entire business model is selling its users’ souls to its customers and which has been heavily implicated in that other thing that happened on the 6th of January 2021, the conclusion was not likely to be good. On or about the 6th of January 2021, WhatsApp users were required to agree to new terms of service or to stop using the service by the 8th of February. If you want security which is not at least partly theatrical you should not use Signal. What’s wrong with Signal’s contact discoveryĪfter WhatsApp’s threatened change to their terms of service, which may allow them to leak information to Facebook, many people are moving to Signal, a tool which purports to be more secure.
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