Thankfully i don't have this problem, almost all of my contacts use only proprietary messengers instead of this shady Signal.
this post was submitted on 23 Nov 2025
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Privacy
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Someone dug out a 2 year old article.
At the blinding speed of technology development in today's timeline, I rarely go back more than a couple years. It's usually stale and outdated even just 2 years ago.
I don't really get it,
Sticking with the snail mail analogy, what happens when two pen pals keep sending mail to each other from their homes without including return addresses in their envelopes? The postal service might not know who exactly is sending each piece of mail but, over time, they would know that Address A in Lower Manhattan, New York, keeps on getting one-way mail from the post office in 3630 East Tremont Avenue, the Bronx, New York; and Address B in the Bronx keeps on getting one-way mail from the post office in 350 Canal Street, Lower Manhattan.
I mean, no, all they know is that they ALL users get one way mail all the time?
The "over time" in "but, over time, they would know that..." does a lot of heavy lifting. Would they? How would they know that?
Sure, if there were only two participants in the system, I would agree. But we have way more than 2 users on signal.
Someone logging timestamps for messages received on both ends of a conversation would be able to determine that two people are probably talking to each other given enough data. Signal is probably not doing that, but Signal's other security guarantees provided by an open source client that encrypts communications end to end hold even if the organization was infiltrated or taken over by a bad actor. The anonymity of participants in a conversation is not protected as strongly as the contents of messages.
Another hit piece on signal? Damn they must be doing something right.
GrapheneOS is being attacked too, by the French government and law enforcement in particular.
Funny coincidence: .ml is a French instance.
EDIT: just to be clear, I DO think it's a coincidence, especially since other posts in this community are pro-graphene and pro-signal.
Wasn't Signal only able to disclose first and last timestamps when a user has connected to their servers when receiving legal requests? I just assumed their protocol made it so that they can't do it, or they theoretically can but don't store such logs.
Does Delta Chat / Arcane Chat suffer from the same vulnerability?
From https://delta.chat/en/help#sealedsender
Does Delta Chat support “Sealed Sender”?
No, not yet.
The Signal messenger introduced “Sealed Sender” in 2018 to keep their server infrastructure ignorant of who is sending a message to a set of recipients. It is particularly important because the Signal server knows the mobile number of each account, which is usually associated with a passport identity.
Even if chatmail relays do not ask for any private data (including no phone numbers), it might still be worthwhile to protect relational metadata between addresses. We don’t foresee bigger problems in using random throw-away addresses for sealed sending but an implementation has not been agreed as a priority yet.
Thanks, that is very clear