Let’s Chat About Signal (Premium)

In late June, a friend messaged me to ask if I had ever tried Signal, the cross-platform encrypted messaging service. I was aware of Signal, but the timing was an interesting coincidence, since an article about Signal had just come up in my feed, and I had saved it to Pocket so I could look into it later. But based on his recommendation, I installed the app on the handset I actually use day-to-day, the Huawei P30 Pro, replacing the Google Messages app I was using previously for SMS and MMS.

Maybe I should have waited.

From a UX perspective, Signal looks and works like any messaging app, and that familiarity helps. And while this is hard to quantify, I actually like using it. It’s well-designed, and there’s no learning curve at all. There’s very little in the way of stupidity, so it’s not bogged down by emojis and animated nonsense. As an adult, I appreciate it’s business-first approach. (Yes, you can see some nonsense in the screenshot above. It's still 2020.)

There are some goofy little things related to privacy, however. By default, Signal won’t display message previews on your lock screen, because, well privacy. There’s an in-app PIN that you’re prompted to use on an almost random schedule. And if you dive into the Privacy section, you’ll find an incredible range of privacy features you can enable and configure.

That makes sense. But what makes no sense are the many text messages I started to receive from people I know in the wake of installing the app.

“Welcome to Signal!” one old friend wrote me out of the blue. It was one of several similar messages I received in the wake of installing the act.

What the f….

I figured Signal was somehow mapping my contacts to its database of users, which seems like a curiously non-private thing to do for a privacy-themed app. Close enough: According to a Signal support document, “People who already know your number and already have you in their contacts see that they can contact you on Signal. Nothing is sent to them by your Signal app or the Signal service. They just see a number they know is registered. If someone knows how to send you an SMS, we want them to see that they can send you a Signal message instead.”

I’m not a privacy nut, but this feels off to me. At the very least, Signal should indicate to you that this could happen, and then give you the option of allowing. But the point of Signal is that communications between two Signal users are encrypted, so having some kind of a visual indicator of that is somewhat logical. (Communications between a Signal user and one or more non-Signal users is not encrypted and works like normal SMS and MMS messaging.)

I gave that one a pass, but I started doing a bit of research into Signal, the research I should have done before I started using it. One thing I discovered is that the app is much more powerful on Android than it is on iOS because of Apple’s walled garden design. Users with iPhones can...

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