The Albanese government’s moves are attacking the existence of a vital free, open-source, encrypted communications platform used by millions of people worldwide.
Meredith Whittaker, the president of the foundation for widely-used global Signal encrypted messaging app, has said it will shut down the system in Australia if forced to hand over its users’ encrypted data to the country’s political surveillance agency, the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO).
A Signal user will commonly have the client app installed on their mobile device.
They may also have a second client on a laptop that syncs the same data.
If the user goes on holiday for a week but leaves their laptop behind, it won’t be synced to the laptop.
On return from holiday, the laptop client uses its decryption keys to retrieve the last week’s worth of messages.
I *think* Signal can do this (retrieve cached messages from the Signal servers) for up to 14 days.
That said, the entire Signal cache is encrypted on their servers, and one’s messages are fully E2EE and retrievable only by the user.
(However, one weakness of Signal is that a desktop or laptop client’s cache is stored unencrypted. To secure these, one needs to use full disk encryption at the OS level or higher.)
Your chats… It’s a messenger service. You can set your chats to disappear if you like, but they’re stored until you set them to be deleted (if you do take that option at all).
…raises hand
“You have stored data on your users?”
@Vanilla_PuddinFudge
Yes…
… but that’s OK.
Lemme explain…
A Signal user will commonly have the client app installed on their mobile device.
They may also have a second client on a laptop that syncs the same data.
If the user goes on holiday for a week but leaves their laptop behind, it won’t be synced to the laptop.
On return from holiday, the laptop client uses its decryption keys to retrieve the last week’s worth of messages.
I *think* Signal can do this (retrieve cached messages from the Signal servers) for up to 14 days.
That said, the entire Signal cache is encrypted on their servers, and one’s messages are fully E2EE and retrievable only by the user.
(However, one weakness of Signal is that a desktop or laptop client’s cache is stored unencrypted. To secure these, one needs to use full disk encryption at the OS level or higher.)
@DarkCloud
Your chats… It’s a messenger service. You can set your chats to disappear if you like, but they’re stored until you set them to be deleted (if you do take that option at all).
Plus, they store your user name ect…