When Strangers Trust "Socials" More Than Signal
Sometimes, I get an urge to be a bit more social. If I'm trying to find others online, there will be an inevitable conversation where I decide that it's time convince someone else to communicate with me on a privacy-friendly service like Signal. The reason is that's it's simply a dealbreaker for me to communicate with them over anything else in the long term. I would rather disengage completely. This is a personal choice that not everyone can afford to do which I do acknowledge.
Sometimes, it's super easy because they already have Signal. Some people are very open to accommodate others and will install it without question. (This is great but I often get the sense that these are the same people who also have a bunch of malware on every device they own because they're too accommodating.) You also get the people who will absolutely refuse to install a privacy-friendly tool like Signal and you have to just give up on pursuing anything else with them. The final group, I find, is the most frustrating to deal with and that's dealing with people who have some concerns about their personal safety, which is, obviously, a good thing but they will have their own practices on how to approach a stranger safely.
As an example, I recently had a conversation with a woman who told me that she wouldn't want to meet me until I'd shared my first name and a photo over myself. I won't say which platform this was on but, like most mainstream platforms, there is no sense of privacy. One bad data breach and my photo is out there for the world to see. I told her that that was something that wasn't ever going to happen. Still, we conversed for a while about non-privacy things to connect a little. (This is absolutely key to connecting with others. Don't be a freak who only ever talks about privacy!)
At some point, I brought up the idea of connecting over Signal with her. She didn't like the idea of it; presumably because Signal isn't the most mainstream thing and anything that isn't mainstream may be questionable, which is totally reasonable!
She gave me a counteroffer of using Discord. I gave her some thoughts on why I didn't think Discord was a good choice in terms of privacy. I can understand why some people think Discord is good for meeting others. Your real identity is hardly linked to the account; your identity can just be a mish-mash of characters if you want and you don't have to use your real name. My problem with Discord like most other platforms is that they don't implement safeguards like end-to-end encryption which means, eventually, your details will leak.
In this particular case, I emphasised the reason I choose to use Signal and was able to convince her! Sometimes, people will disappear at this point and it was just wasn't meant to be.
A similar example is the usage of dating apps. (Yes, I have some experience with them despite hating everything that they stand for.) Like the previous example, most people will communicate purely through the dating platform until at least the first date is done. Some people will connect before but this might be done through "socials" such as Instagram. From speaking to a few people, this is largely to avoid sharing their phone number which means they do have the right concerns in mind.
Why I Suggest Signal To Meet Strangers
This post is already long enough without going into length why I like Signal. I might do a longer post on it but it all boils down to:
- Not exposing your phone number
- Being able to unmatch with someone (as is common in dating apps)
- Not having to expose your real name if you don't want to
- Not having your private messages being exposed to third parties
- Not depending on an app that's actively harvesting data off your phone (it's open source and reproducible!)
One caveat is that Signal needs to be set up for the lowest common denominator that you intend to speak to. For example, setting a profile picture for your family to see means strangers will also see it. This is why I have Signal configured to be as default as possible. An app that solves this problem is SimpleX. (This isn't a recommendation.)
Signal is great. Use it with everyone you can and that includes strangers.