I am trying to convince my group to switch from WhatsApp to Signal and we plan to vote on it soon. So, I plan to use the replies in this thread to compile a list of reasons to use as talking points. Preferably, I need something that can be understood on a personal level as some of my friends are deeply cynical and have no concern about escaping techno-feudalism and surveillance.
One is owned by a US tech corp whose primary income stream is building advertising profiles on users and selling advertising space to businesses while handing data off to authoritarian governments without warrants.
The other is a US non profit where the FBI admitted the only data they can get from them is when the user registered and when they were last online.
and recently they figured out how to use the OS’s notification database to collect some cache and read the notifications Signal sends
fortunately, most OSs now offer granular enough notification controls so they can be set to just notify users when messages are received and nothing more.
On one OS. You can tune Signal not to display the notification contents. Moreover, if you’re on iOS and actually expect privacy, you should probably reflect on your choices a little more.
Realistically iOS is more private than base android at this point
But not Graphene. I’ve yet to hear about this exploit on Android. Curious if it holds true.
They pulled the Signal messages from an iPhone… https://www.forbes.com/sites/larsdaniel/2026/04/10/fbi-pulled-deleted-signal-messages-from-an-iphone-without-breaking-encryption/
… Because the person had message previews in notifs turned on
But only thanks to Apples ability to see and obtain every notification that lands on your phone.
I’ll add this; A stock apple phone can not be made privacy centric.
A base android phone may not be as privacy respecting as apple, but can be made far more privacy respecting then the apple phone could ever possibly be