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Friday 5 February 2021

Swapping to Signal

Following the announcements earlier this year about how much metadata that FB products trap about our conversations, many people are swapping to Signal. While I wrote about Facebook's metadata harvest previously (here), I had dithered about moving to Signal.

Elon Musk's tweet, "Use Signal" (2021) spurred me to make the move to the Signal app, like many others (Hodge, 2021). I am well on the way to migrating as many of my messaging groups as I can to the new platform. I am happy to pay for the privacy and encryption, should Signal start to call for donations. But I am over giving my stuff away for free so that Facebook can data mine me.

What was interesting was how many people made the leap to Signal or Telegram following the articles about FB's proposed changes to the metadata and privacy on WhatsApp, and the analysis by Lovejoy of Signal, iMessage, Messenger and WhatsApp (2021; Hodge, 2021). I think the tide is beginning to turn on our views about who owns our data, and how prepared we are to give it away. And that is not a bad thing.

If you are interested in using Signal, I have found it very easy to use. Download the App from the Playstore/iStore for your phone first, and register. Then you can download the app for your PC or Mac here.

To misquote Hill Street Blues, "let's keep our data safe out there".


Sam

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