their servers are in the usa.
Their "home office" is in the US. That doesn't necessarily mean they don't have servers distributed globally.
So the usa government has the same level of access as compared to whatsapp?
No, the US government does not have the same level of access to Signal as they do with Whatsapp. The only reason the US has so much access to Whatsapp is because Whatsapp only bothered to implement End-to-end encryption (E2EE). Unfortunately, in 2205, E2EE is the bare minimum. E2EE via the Signal protocol has been a "solved issue" since 2013 and Whatsapp implemented it 3 years later (great!) but they have not improved privacy since. Whatsapp still collects a metric-fuck-ton of metadata like:
- Who you communicate with
- When you communicate
- How long your calls last
- The frequency of communication
- When you're "active" on the platform
- Group memberships and group titles
- Your profile information (this is E2EE on Signal)
- Your contacts get uploaded in a way that's visible to Whatsapp. Signal does contact discovery in a privacy preserving way.
Then they correlate this data with everything else they have about you to "fill in the gaps". Signal doesn't collect any metadata.
It's non profit now, but so was openai...
The difference here is there's nothing of value for Signal to "sell" since they don't collect metadata and have engineered it to work without being able to see anything. The Signal server and client are already open source, there's no "secret sauce". Lastly, because they collect zero data they can't even sell it for ad-serving purposes. Who would buy Signal?
switching to another app is difficult, it's hard to get people ingrained in an ecosystem switch once let alone twice
100% agree. The best way I've found is to drop the offending platform (whatsapp) and move to Signal. Let others know you accept text/SMS or Signal messages. Over the years the people on Signal (at least in my group) has steadily grown.
I would like to close by saying that Signal is not shy about complying with the law, they will not go to prison for anyone's potential crimes. That said, they publish the data they provide when compelled by law and the only data they collect is the day + time you signed up with their service and the last day (not time) one of your clients pinged their servers, source: https://signal.org/bigbrother/
BrikoX@lemmy.zip 3 weeks ago
Any company operating in any country has to comply with their laws. The difference is that Singal has almost no data to share to comply. Message content and metadata is encrypted so they have no access to it. Your phone number is the only identifier they have and would be obligated by law to share.