There's an idealogical collision course between safely offering usernames+financial transactions and maintaining an absolutist stance on encryption.<p>Within minutes, you'll have people going by @ElonMusk and @JeffBezos running scams to millions of non tech-savvy users. Are you going to try to stop that in any way? Can you, while maintaining full encryption?<p>I can appreciate Moxie sticking to his guns, but he'll need a better plan than "we'll deal with the problem when it comes." if he doesn't want to get deplatformed by Apple/Google or face government scrutiny.
The narrative is being set to end end to end encryption. Expect more hypothetical articles like this going forward. The powers want to control the narrative. I would bet that there will be laws rolled out in the next few years.
I’m not sure i agree with a lot of these complaints. Of course potential terrorist groups will abuse any service they can, but I don’t see that as a reason to create said service. If anything refusing to will just allow them to be outcompeted as someone else steps in to fill that niche and disrupting them.<p>Same for the crypto concerns. Criminals and bad actors are going to use crypto to exchange money regardless so what’s the point in not adding it to your platform?<p>I was expecting the abuse to be from state agencies, not an encryption company literally spewing the same anti-encryption rhetoric we’ve heard for years.
I dumped signal less over the data collection they've started doing and more for the fact that they've been less than transparent about it. Nearly a year ago their forums were filled with objections, security concerns, and questions and for months they went ignored. When they finally made setting a pin optional they were equally unclear that it would just set a random one for you and that this didn't prevent your data from being uploaded to the cloud.<p>I took it as a sign that they were telling us not to trust them as clearly as they were allowed. For secure communications I'm using Jami now and I've been very impressed. For SMS/MMS in general I'm still looking. I've tried a few alternatives and frankly I'm not really happy with any of them.
Key phrase here is - "we are not algorithmically amplifying content"<p>Trump (or Obama for that matter and such characters who suddenly appear out of nowhere due to their pandering to a fan club skills) cannot be propped up at light speed without algorithmic amplification. Read that again Trump and Obama are not possible without the Like Button and the algo amplification it enables.<p>That is the main lesson from the last 15 years. And apps that don't have reward mechanisms that prop up time wasting Pandering section of the population are not going to produce the side effects Youtube, Twitter and Facebook did.
The interesting question is, how can they prevent abuse?<p>1. Spoofed names to perpetrated scams.<p>2. Groups promoting evil (however it's defined).<p>IIRC by default ny contact must be whitelisted, which helps a bit with scams. But if people get a contact request by their bank or employer, what will they do?<p>For the latter, Signal could incorporate messages in their app that undermines that behavior - for example, promoting tolerance, providing resources for people to report criminal activity, providing encouragement and resources for people to escape cult-like behavior, etc. I wonder how effective that would be.