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Basically, a good way to never trust "it's okay, the data is anonymized" again is simply knowing what the "Hemisphere Program" is.
https://www.eff.org/cases/hemisphere
In short, the US government got access to number from, number to, datetime, length and sometimes location infor...
As an aside, I'm very much convinced that Signal's primary objective is to gather phone numbers in order to facilitate the US government tracing social networks of people who are already of interest Their main focus isn't on what these people are discussing, they want to know who is talking to whom first and foremost. Signal's subpar user experience is a feature from this perspective. Due to its inconvenience for the average person, those with a strong need or desire to communicate sensitive information are more likely to utilize it.
Did everybody just straight up forget about the NSA data collection center in Utah or wherever?
The capability was literally to record the internet. All the data, all the time.
Between that and fusion centers using data they can just straight up buy from everyone they can build a picture of who you are, who you talk to, where you drive, how often you speed, what you're looking for online...
If it is electronically transmissible it is not private and you should assume gmen are reading it.
I work in embedded software, if it has a processor and an antenna you cannot trust it. You must assume that it is either already compromised or could be.
As an aside, I'm very much convinced that Signal's primary objective is to gather phone numbers in order to facilitate the US government tracing social networks of people who are already of interest Their main focus isn't on what these people are discussing, they want to know who is talking to whom first and foremost. Signal's subpar user experience is a feature from this perspective. Due to its inconvenience for the average person, those with a strong need or desire to communicate sensitive information are more likely to utilize it.
It's so, so much easier just to track iMessage or RCS or SMS (where you can get content as well) than to create a third party app, hide your money trail and create two versions of the source code and maintain both the fake (with sealed sender) and the real, harvesting one all while avoiding your own subpoenas and paying off countless auditors.
Think of it like the Nigerian email scheme, Signal by its nature selects for people you might care about, which drastically reduces the number of people you need to track. Meanwhile, all the tracking is done server-side, which already openly collects phone numbers, you don't really need to do much additional work there to harvest these numbers. However, speaking of the source code, it's worth noting that Signal won't even make reproducible builds.
I think if you ran a server and didn't federate you'd be fine. So it depends what you were planning to use it for. Being able to centralize all your various IM apps is pretty sweet.