Signal is the No. 1 downloaded app in the Netherlands. But why? | TechCrunch
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Privacy-focused messaging app Signal has been flying high in the Dutch app stores this past month, sitting in pole-position for much of it.
  • einfach_orangensaft@sh.itjust.works
    16·
    4 days ago

    Fuck signal. No “privacy” focused messenger should need a phone number to register…at that point u basically handing the agencys meta data on a platter

          • easily3667@lemmus.orgEnglish
            1·
            3 days ago

            But why do you want to license it at all? It’s normally not licensed. When AI vendors break the law they don’t care about licenses. Fuck, look at meta.

              • easily3667@lemmus.orgEnglish
                1·
                2 days ago

                Yes, it did not answer my question. Legally you don’t have to do anything to make it so corporations legally can’t use this for AI unless you signed away your rights and if you signed away your rights you can’t change the license back with a notice. So what’s it actually for?

                • onlinepersona@programming.devEnglish
                  2·
                  2 days ago

                  I should probably write a blog post about it. Basically it’s there to possibly get commercial LLMs in trouble for scraping licensed stuff. LLMs have been tricked into revealing their training data and gotten in trouble for that. There are also ongoing lawsuits due to those revelations. Maybe the most notable is the one against Github’s Microsoft’s CoPilot for spitting out licensed (GPL and also copyrighted from private repos) code.

                  Whether the lawsuits will be successful or not is yet to be determined (Japan already considers nearly everything fair game for training AIs and machine learning). Whether they will have an impact if they are successful is also unknown. It just costs me a key-stroke (and the occasional response to a friendly question like yours), so I do it 🤷 Once all my hope is lost, I might stop.

                  From another answer. I highlighted the important part, which explains why the explicit link to the license text instead of it being implicit.

                  Anti Commercial-AI license

        • edric@lemm.ee
          5·
          4 days ago

          No, that is an important distinction. People have different threat models. For most people, privacy without anonymity may suffice (i.e. I don’t mind that you know it’s me, I just don’t want you to see what I’m sending). For others (i.e. journalists, whistleblowers, more privacy-centric individuals), anonymity may be equally important.

          • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
            1·
            3 days ago

            Exactly. And requiring a phone number enables convenience features like:

            • account recovery
            • find contacts
            • be found by other people

            Once you have an account, you can disable the phone number and use Hawks usernames instead (can be changed at will) of disable discovery entirely.

            It’s a pretty reasonable limitation IMO.

              • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
                3·
                3 days ago

                yeah but by whom?

                Whoever controls the number. This is fine for 90% of people who hold on to their number, especially since no data is leaked unless you are sent messages after changing your number. But that’s the same for SMS, so it’s not a downgrade from that.

                dont you know who u wana talk with?

                Yes, but most aren’t on signal yet. When they do join, it’s nice for them to know you’re on it too so your communication can default to that.

                You can disable discovery (I do).

    • Chakravanti@monero.townEnglish
      1·
      3 days ago

      Errybody hatin’ your logic but your logic is just that: paranoid and for no shortage of good reason and those are my dice.

      Session

      GPG

    • Opisek@lemmy.world
      2·
      4 days ago

      You know that your phone number is never saved anywhere? Signal only uses a cryptographic hash of your phone number.

      • einfach_orangensaft@sh.itjust.works
        1·
        3 days ago

        Yeah lets use the phone number of a middle man to sign up…sure u wont forget to relock the number every week so they dont get the power for account take over since they manage your number.

        • easily3667@lemmus.orgEnglish
          1·
          3 days ago

          So no disagreement on the wackadoo part.

          Tbh I hope you’re doing something cool with this paranoia. Like I want to see news articles about you secretly fighting evil, not sitting at home playing pirated video games.

    • nutbutter@discuss.tchncs.de
      0·
      4 days ago

      I know it’s not the best, but it is great when you want someone to shift from other popular proprietary app like WhatsApp.