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this post was submitted on 11 May 2025
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Privacy
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What are you talking about? Are you saying sealed sender is a lie? If so, I want some proof.
Anti Commercial-AI license
They are referring to message metadata.
Even if they don't show the content of messages, if they can show that phone number A is sending messages and getting replies to number B then that's all the government needs.
https://signal.org/legal/
They store metadata, which is distinct from encrypted data.
https://signal.org/blog/sealed-sender/
They have a list of encrypted messages, who it's from and who it's to, based upon the sealed sender description. If you are using phone numbers then you are not anonymous, and a TLA agency can search known bad numbers even if Signal does not try to build that graph.
Did.. Did you just read the problem they were trying to solve, and just, skip the solution?
No.
They haven't hidden it yet. It's a goal.
What?
That blog entry is almost 7 years old. Sealed Sender came a long time ago.
The literal quote you provide has a link on "exploring techniques" that you didn't click. It takes you to another blog post for the launch of Private Contact Discovery, which takes you to a repo of the service, but because your cutting and pasting such old stuff even that's been replaced by a V2.
Please take a step back and read the technical docs, or at least more recent info.
As ratcheting and chaining are used, messages are sent with rotating keys on ebery message as the sender/recipient identifiers for the messages, not the phone number. It would be way easier to tap Google for Firebase notifications to get to what you are talking about.
And the capability argument is moot if it's been proven in court to not be done today. You could say that about any service that uses push notifications that go through cloud providers.
Tagging @onlinepersona@programming.dev
The ONLY data Signal stores about you is your phone number, most recent registration time/date and most recent login time/date. They don't know who you're messaging or when you're messaging them AFAIK.
You can see this for yourself at signal.org/bigbrother
I am really frustrated when this is brought up, since it only shows what they have been collecting so far, not what they're capable of collecting. The government agencies can force them to do whatever modifications to the server AND to keep completely silent about it. I am still trying to understand whether Sealed Sender would protect from a server collecting and recording ALL the data it possibly can.
Also if anyone else wrote it, there would be so much savaging of weasel words.
They brag that they don't retain this data, so when governments request historical data they don't have it.
They don't say that they don't provide it for anyone else to retain, so if they are given the to and from to process the message, and provide this to the CIA to retain then all of this security would be useless but would also fulfill all of the claims here.