[laserbeam]

I know you are not being facetious. My problem is random Joe on the street sees it as a bug. He really does care more about actually being able to talk with his wife than Signal’s mathematically correct principles. He needs it to be reliable first, secure second.

[IlikeKitties]

> He needs it to be reliable first, secure second.

Than he should use something else. I need signal to be secure first, second and third and reliable in edge cases like this a distant number.

[zbentley]

Perhaps it’s a marketing problem, then. Signal is marketed as a secure and full-featured alternative to things like WhatsApp and iMessage. Most people start reading that sentence after the word “secure”, and then are surprised and disappointed when a device replacement loses all their history.

I think it would be better if Signal more loudly communicated the drawbacks of its encryption approach up-front, warning away casual users before they get a nasty surprise after storing a lot of important data in Signal.

I’ve heard Signal lovers say the opposite—that getting burned with data loss is somehow educational for or deserved by casual users—and I think that’s asinine and misguided. It’s the equivalent of someone saying “ha! See? You were trading away privacy for convenience and relying on service-provider-readable message history as a record all along, don’t you feel dumb?”, to which most users’ will respond “no, now that you’ve explained the tradeoffs…that is exactly how I want it to work; you can use Signal, but I want iMessage”.

It shouldn’t take data loss to make that understood.

[kelnos]

You've been downvoted, but I think that's a fair take. There will always be tension between security and usability; it's difficult (impossible?) to do the absolute best in both metrics.

Signal's development team can decide that they prioritize security over usability to whatever degree they like, and that's their prerogative. That may result in fewer users, and a less than stellar reputation in the usability space, but that's up to them. And if we (the unpaying user base) don't like it, we are free to use something else that better meets our needs.

[golem14]

Yeah, but if use proton for everything else and signal only for my secret world domination plans, traffic analysis will be so much easier…

[AnonC]

GP here. I agree. I should’ve stated that I don’t like losing chat history and have seen that as a problem with Signal.

I have edited my previous comment to reflect that I don’t like losing chat history.