Here's yet another reason why Signal should NOT be held up as the standard for secure and/or private comms.
@voltronic
Seems like a "know how your app works" article.
Would it lead you to choose an app from a company whose business model is harvesting your data so you can be targeted by advertisers?
Maybe I haven't kept up since I made my choice...?
@BrentSullivan
> Would it lead you to choose an app from a company whose business model is harvesting your data so you can be targeted by advertisers?
Of course not. Here's something better:
@voltronic
Cool!
Thanks!
@voltronic I'm a big fan of Signal so maybe a bit biased here, but I believe this is simply b/c the quote of a previous message is an entirely separate copy & will always adhere to the setting of the new disappearing message timer. They're probably ways around this, but I would imagine it becomes exceedingly complex, requiring some remnant of the disappeared message to enforce the quote disappearing which could introduce bugs, or worse security vulnerabilities, in future updates.
@nova
This doesn't seem to complex to me. I'm pretty sure that on Twitter, when someone quote-tweets and the original is deleted, the quoted message is replaced with a message stating that it was deleted by the author. Now, we know that Twitter doesn't *actually* delete messages from their servers, but if they *did* (like on CoSo) then that would take care of it.
Signal is a centralized messenger, so I don't see why they couldn't use a similar implementation.
@nova
Obviously copy-paste would still retain what was posted, but I'm talking about using the quote function built into the app. If the quote is made to be pointing to the original post rather than scraping its text, then if the original post is deleted from the DB it should be gone everywhere it is referenced, no?
@voltronic out of a desire to double check I decided to test this on my note-to-self chat. Perhaps they could implement a feature where regardless of the disappearing message setting anything that's quoted inherits the disappearing message timer of what's being quoted rather than the new setting. Something quoted could still be visible after the fact but only for the same amount of time as the quoted message.
@voltronic
One slight correction though, because I suspect there might be a misunderstanding. Signal might be centralized as far as the servers that route messages. But the messages themselves only exist on the server, long enough to be routed to their destination. After that they only exist on end-user devices. So when you're quote-replying, you're quoting your copy not a copy from some central repository.
@nova
Oh, I stand corrected then. I had only used Signal briefly several years ago and missed this detail.
You might be interested how SimpleX Chat handles this, which is quite different from all the other messengers out there. It's totally decentralized, so all parties need to agree to "delete for all" and other options such as disappearing messages.
@voltronic
"if that message was quoted previously in a reply, the app still shows around 70 characters of the message"
yeah never been a fan of signal did try it when it came out but na not for me