You know Signal, right? Used by protesters fighting the good fight and government employees spilling the good tea, the app is a decentralized, privacy-first messaging app with a reputation for keeping prying corporate eyes off its users’ texts.
Now, Signal has announced that it’s rolling out a secure cloud service that’ll back up your Signal history to a server that’ll let you keep your messages even if you lose your phone, and it’s giving all users 100MB of storage for free. That’ll hold a lot of texts about secret war plans.
a cloud under lock and key
Signal says that users have been asking for a way to back up their chat history so that if they lose or break a phone, they don’t lose all their texts, photos, and documents in their Signal apps.
Because Signal is privacy-minded, all those things live inside the phone’s Signal app and not on a server somewhere, from which a hacker could access them. That makes Signal very secure, but it also leaves people in a precarious sort of predicament.
With the opt-in cloud storage, a user can back up their Signal usage history to a secure server. As soon as you put something on the cloud, though, it becomes a potential liability.
“Using the same zero-knowledge technology that enables Signal groups to work without revealing intimate metadata, backup archives are stored without a direct link to a specific backup payment or Signal user account,” wrote Signal in a September 8 press release announcing the rollout.
If you’re still absolutely after the highest level of privacy and security on Signal, at the expense of convenience and redundancy, you’re still going to want to opt out of the cloud service. And you may as well go ahead and set your messages to auto-disappear every few weeks, which you can find in your Signal app’s settings menu.
Let’s just hope, then, that you’re not the sentimental type.
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