Does anyone know where this is at? I thought WhatsApp were being forced by the EU in 2024 to introduce this under the Digital Markets App? I’m googling, but am finding very little info.
It would be great if we could use Signal to communicate with WhatsApp groups. The sooner I can delete WhatsApp the better.
So, we had people who loved to send unencrypted SMS messages with Signal. And now we have people who opposes to send encrypted E2EE messages because they could leak supposedly a lot of metadata such as “when the message was delivered, who it was sent to and more” and it would be the end of privacy in Signal.
We should not forget that this only happens if you send messages out of Signal. This would be optional for every user of Signal.
Interoperatibility is the CORE of Internet. Silos are contrary to the idea of Internet. This is an opportunity to interconnect systems, to boost innovation and to give the opportunity to signal and others to gain users, which is now almost impossible with the current monopoly of whatsapp in Europe.
I imagine all the extremist of privacy in Signal with a Proton email account. And I imagine them only sending/receiving emails from other Proton email accounts. Sending to SPAM or to the delete folder every other email because other emails do not achieve the privacy requirements of Proton. In fact, the only real good solution for privacy with Email is to delete the Email account.
If you don’t know how big a deal metadata is, you do not understand anything about online data security and privacy.
Sorry, real privacy is silo’d, just like the vast majority of online traffic is, the widely agreed upon base interoperability standards are not private or secure.
SMS is an insecure interoperable standard.
Meta is an insecure silo.
Stop pretending it is an interoperable standard, it isn’t, it’s just a popular, shitty silo.
Signal is a secure silo.
I’m all for upgrading the universal messaging standards to Signal’s, but that’ll never happen, because governments (EDIT: and databroker MegaCorps) don’t actually like real privacy.
If you wanna stay in a mainstream, dream for corporate data brokers and government surveillance silo, go ahead, nobody is stopping you.
If you wanna join the ‘we actually have privacy’ silo, well, it does things differently, and it’s on you to acclimate to those differences instead of destroying them and demanding assimilation and thus destruction of the very privacy that makes it distinct.
Please see my above post, I edited and expanded it with an illustrative comic as you were making your reply.
EDIT 2: Also Proton is cozying up to Trump, publically, guess you missed the memo on that.
It is easy, even if interoperability is enabled, do not send messages out of Signal. It would be your option. But other people with non military-grade privacy requirements could benefit of improved privacy when it sends messages to whatsapp users from signal app because signal app is foss and signal would enforce better security and privacy than whatsapp app. Signal would gain traction and it could reach more people willing to abandon Meta and corps.
… No, you don’t get it.
Every time a Signal user would send a message to WhatsApp, they’d be leaking metadata to WhatsApp, because WhatsApp would create and store metadata from the Signal message it recieves, which would make the Signal user insecure, less secure, because WhatsApp will sell that data to data brokers or provide it to the government if requested.
This represents a loss of privacy and security to Signal users, not an increase.
… Also, Signal is not actually 100% foss, it uses some closed source, Google provided components.
Molly FOSS is a fork of Signal that replaces these Google components with fully foss ones.
…
You keep acting like Signal has some need to expand its market share, and that the best way to get it to do so is by abandoning its core, primary feature, the reason people use it.
Signal will likely never do this, because they are interested in security and privacy, not comprimising security and privacy in hopes of gaining popularity and market share.
Again, see the comic I already linked.
You are demanding that two incompatible things be made compatible because one of them is better, but you fundamentally do not understand that making them compatible will make the better thing as bad as the worse thing.
You can fit the square peg into the round hole, but only if you shave down the square peg into a cylinder, at which point, you no longer have a square peg.
If you got your way and Signal could message WhatsApp, and then you started using Signal to just only talk to WhatsApp users, you might as well just be using WhatsApp to talk to WhatsApp users, it would be the same level of (in)security.
This would also make no sense for Signal to do because it would make their own software pointless, just an alternative gateway to WhatsApp, with less features than WhatsApp and less security than it had before.
…
If you wanna make a Signal fork that can interoperate with WhatsApp, go right ahead, no one is stopping you.
Set up a clone of the Signal repo, setup a WhatsApp business account, purchase access to WhatsApp’s API, host and pay for your own servers to manage the WhatsApp end of the system, and write your desired interoperability features into your Signal fork, then release it as an app for android, iOS, macOS, windows and linux.
Here’s an intro to the WhatsApp API:
https://nativemsg.com/resources/text-marketing/the-ultimate-guide-to-whatsapp-api-everything-you-need-to-know/
Here’s the Signal repo:
https://github.com/signalapp
Best of luck!
Best of luck also for your next fork. Please share with us your improvements in metadata privacy.