[ConcernedCitizen]

Rip to the people who should have just stuck to signal

Who's to say Signal can't suffer a similar fate?

It's tough to answer this question... let's first talk about transparency.

To understand the severity of the state of privacy on the internet and the safety of its users, you have to understand that it will never be possible to obtain 100% transparency or security. Even browsers like Firefox, Brave, Librewolf, Waterfox, etc. - all user-friendly and promising privacy and ad-blocking as well as fingerprinting protection - still do not disable telemetry by default before startup on the first run, and in some case that isn't possible. Such is the case of all browsers. This is an example of some of the destination addresses a network analysis reveals about some of the DNS and HTTPS requests Firefox makes even when telemetry and automatic updates are completely disabled:

• detectportal.firefox.com
  
• detectportal.prod.mozaws.net
  
• detectportal.firefox.com-v2.edgesuite.net
  
• a1089.dscd.akamai.net
  
• mozilla.org
  
• location.services.mozilla.com
  
• content-signature-2.cdn.mozilla.net
  
• locprod1-elb-eu-west-1.prod.mozaws.net
  
• d2nxq2uap88usk.cloudfront.net
  
• firefox.settings.services.mozilla.com
  
• push.services.mozilla.com
  
• ec2-52-35-220-92.us-west-2.compute.amazonaws.com
  
• ec2-34-242-33-12.eu-west-1.compute.amazonaws.com
  
• server-13-33-240-52.hel50.r.cloudfront.net
  
• shavar.services.mozilla.com
  

I know it's outside of the topic entirely but you should really be wary of what browser you use. If your threat model specifically requires you to have maximum anonymity and privacy, you should always default to Tor browser instead of packing extensions into your current Firefox profile or altering the user.js as in Arkenfox/user.js.

Now, certainly operatives and citizens looking to remain private and secure shouldn't be required to know all the ways an adversary could target them from the authoritarian regimes in Belarus, Russia, Venezuela, and China; death squads in Bangladesh; military juntas in Myanmar; and those seeking to abuse and oppress in Turkey, UAE, and elsewhere. Because that wouldn't be important. The only important thing is the "how", because they live the "why" every day. Operatives and citizens need something simple and effective and most importantly - it doesn't make them stand out because millions of others use it at any given time.

The case for Signal is just that. It's end-to-end encryption when both parties use it and it offers what journalists and operatives and citizens all strive to achieve: privacy.

"As the world stands today, the future of ... privacy does not look great. The existing landscape is dominated by traditional credit companies, who over the past decade have been steadily pushing their networks for increased access to user data ... but the data story there is similar. This is not a future we are particularly excited about. At Signal, we want to help build a different kind of tech – where software is built for you rather than for your data – so these are trends that we watch warily."