Hot Saucerman
MOTHER FATHER CHINESE DENTIST!
Situationists never die, they’re just remixed.
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Forgive me, you’re correct. I stopped using it when it dropped SMS, because I had only ever able to get people on it through SMS, but at the time had read plans about eventually dropping the phone number requirement. I mixed those things up in my head.
From what I understand, they’re fully invested in dropping the phone number requirement though, and some more googling says that they’ve had versions of Signal PNP (phone number privacy) running for a while now.
You’re correct, that part hasn’t actually changed over yet, but it’s in the works.
If you trust Telegram you’re naive. Here is a great breakdown earlier this year from Kaspersky.
https://usa.kaspersky.com/blog/telegram-why-nobody-uses-secret-chats/27662/
Signal isn’t perfect either, but their mistakes are far less egregious. They also have removed some of the more egregious mistakes, like needing a phone number (edit: incorrect, see below) or google play services to function. It can be run on a device without Google Play Services because it only uses Google Play Services for push notifications.
My personal feelings about the application aside (I am not a fan)…
I think the only one where it’s conceivable that they could have access to your credentials is the iMessage bridge, and they claim to have done a lot of backend work so they don’t store your password in any way.
I was on the waitlist when it was a paid app and I had not pre-paid for access, and my opinions are based on that.
I would start by saying any privacy bonafides this application has are from it running on the Matrix protocol and using Matrix bridges.
I was on the waitlist for over a year. I was honestly initially very excited when my turn came, because this was after they changed their funding method, switching from “everyone pays” to “some users pay for additional features to be unlocked.”
I got a Zoom link sent to me for “onboarding.” This was because initially, setup was fairly complicated for some people, and folks needed to be walked through it.
The first notification that I would not have privacy and my communications with this company would be recorded was when I entered the Zoom chat room and was notified that Beeper would be recording the session.
At no point in the year before this had it been made clear that any communications with this company would be recorded. I logged off and wrote an email stating that this is why I did not join the onboarding process. I left for work shortly after and thought about it the rest of the day.
I would not receive a reply offering for a non-recorded zoom session until the next day. By that point, I had questions, and I asked that they answer some of these questions before I re-scheduled a new meeting.
The questions were all related to Eric Micigovsky and his previous entrepeneurship with Pebble watch. When he sold Pebble, he screwed the workers on the way out, in my opinion, and it did not give me hope that he would make sure to sell Beeper to a company with the same values as he laid out in creating the application. He was happy to sell his company when it became unprofitable before: what would prevent him from doing it again?
More importantly: If the company is sold, how is there any guarantee that the privacy policy would not change?
I never received a response to these questions at all. I declined to ever use the service, ever since. I figured if they didn’t think it was worth spending the time to answer such questions to me and lose me as a customer, they must not be very worried about the answers to such questions. Based on this, and the CEOs past history, I felt using the service was inadvisable.
Finally, in something that isn’t so much my opinion as much as a fact.
When it comes to using iMessage specifically, you need a macOS server or an iPhone (both need to be relatively new) to run the iMessage bridge from. Beeper runs a fleet of these, but to make this work, you have to turn off some extra security settings on your Apple ID, and you have to give Beeper your password just once. They claim it is never stored, logged, or cached. It’s quite possible that this is true, but it does mean you technically have your Apple ID logged in on a foreign machine you have no control over. What if this machine and all the other macOS servers got hacked to be part of a botnet? What if Apple bans all the Apple IDs involved for being part of a botnet? It leaves more questions I’m skeptical there are good answers for.
I guess it’s too hard to consider real people with real opinions might populate a niche website with small userbase and an active anti-advertising attitude.
I guess it’s also too hard to just look at an account and decide if it seems spammy or if it seems like a real person, and easier to just cast aspersions because they… annoyed you?
Anyway, thanks for standing up for us both.