Situatie
Signal is published by the Signal Foundation and Signal Messenger LLC. These two not-for-profit organizations—based in Mountain View, California—were founded by Matthew Rosenfeld (aka ‘Moxie Marlinspike’) and Brian Acton. Together they continue the work started at Open Whisper Systems, one of Rosenfeld’s earlier start-ups.
The Signal application is free and open source. Anyone can review the source code. The source code for the Signal Messenging Protocol (SMP) was reviewed by a joint team from the German CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security, the Swiss ETH Zurich University, Cisco, and the Canadian University of Waterloo. They declared the code clean, the motives pure, and the encryption rock-solid. Signal is definitely secure.
Solutie
The Difference Between Privacy and Security
Privacy is about controlling your information and data, choosing who has access to it, and deciding what they can do with it. Security is one of the techniques that you can use to maintain your privacy.
The security provided by the SMP is so strong that other apps, such as WhatsApp, have adopted the Signal protocol to provide end-to-end encryption for their own products. But, although WhatsApp may be secure as far as the transmission of your messages goes, that doesn’t address any privacy concerns. The security of the protocol is completely unrelated to WhatsApp’s policy of data harvesting and data sharing. It’s those activities that affect your privacy, and it’s the gotcha that has catapulted WhatsApp into the public eye and the worst PR storm of its 11-year history.
WhatsApp harvests and logs data about you and your use of their app. The company stores this data—including your contact list, who you have contacted, the details of purchases you have made through the app, and your location when you use the app—on their servers. So although the delivery of your messages is secure, WhatsApp keeps a lot of private data about you. And WhatsApp is owned by Facebook.
By contrast, Signal holds virtually nothing on you. It stores the smartphone number you registered with, when you signed up to use Signal, and when you last used the service. That’s it. A phone number and two timestamps. So even if they’re hit with a subpoena, that’s all they can hand over to the authorities. Nothing about your messages, your location, or anything else.
Signal starts to make a lot of sense when you scratch the surface of how your data is often used as a commodity by other companies.
Installing Signal on Linux
There’s only one way to sign up for Signal, and that is through your smartphone. It works on Android phones and iPhones. So if you don’t have Signal installed on your smartphone, go and do that first. It must be working on your smartphone before you can use it on your computer.
Signal is available in the repositories for some Linux distributions. It is also available as a flatpak and a snap. We’ll install the snap on Ubuntu.
sudo snap install signal-desktop
You can use the snap on Fedora too, but to cover all bases, we’ll demonstrate installing the flatpak.
sudo flatpak install https://dl.flathub.org/repo/appstream/org.signal.Signal.flatpakref
On Manjaro, you can install it directly from pacman
.
sudo pacman -Sy signal-desktop
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