i’ve been meaning to switch fully to signal, but since not many people where i live wanna switch too, i often tell them to just call me. Is that private enough as a privacy conscious individual?
Phone calls are one of the least secure ways to communicate. Guaranteed that the phone company and spy agencies are listening to it all.
No. None of your network traffic is private and you can assume it’s being read.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/33_Thomas_Street#Usage
https://theintercept.com/2016/11/16/the-nsas-spy-hub-in-new-york-hidden-in-plain-sight/
https://theintercept.com/2018/06/25/att-internet-nsa-spy-hubs/
https://www.propublica.org/article/a-trail-of-evidence-leading-to-atts-partnership-with-the-nsa
Things like HTTPS (web traffic) are backed by certificate authorities which could be compromised. Your cellular radio traffic is encrypted, with keys controlled by the phone company which has the same problem. It’s been shown in several cases (like the Snowden leaks) that ISPs and tech companies cooperate with the NSA.
That being said, well implemented encryption using sufficiently large keys allows you to communicate over networks even if they are compromised. All of this is only secure as the endpoints. All of the encryption in world doesn’t help you if an adversary has root access to a device in the conversation.
I can’t tell you that you should trust Signal, I’m just a screenname on the Internet. However, if you look at the people who have the authority to directly ask intelligence services about their collection capabilities… those people use Signal.
It’s not worth fully switching to any platform as you’ll lose out on communicating with anyone on those platforms. You may be able to move key friends to signal, but you may need to keep access to WhatsApp and a regular phone even if they’re not your preferred option.
Don’t limit yourself unless it’s absolutely necessary.
Not if you hold you phone out in front of you and have a conversation on public transport like a complete arsehole.
Fuck those narcissists
No. Western governments for decades have been running automated keyword systems on all calls listening for phrases like “bomb” and flagging all such calls. Get flagged enough and a human reviews it.
This is done with full cooperation of the big telephone companies and has gone beyond intelligence use to “lawful access” requests from the police. The Snowden revelations were not that this was being done (I mean it’s mentioned in Enemy of the State so it was an open ‘secret’ by 1998) but rather that the NSA was doing this for all internet traffic, for all emails, for webcam sessions, that they were storing things that were not even flagged in a vast database of innocent people who hit no keywords and thus had no reason to be under suspicion. That was the big outrage, that and the hacking and national security letters to big companies and the fact it was all searchable by humans like Snowden (and now with AI can all be analyzed in detail unfortunately to create detailed records on every single living person).
Absolutely not. The assumption for telephone networks is this: every call is automatically transcribed and recorded. Further autonomous analysis is done on that transcription and if flagged a human would start listening to the recordings or ask for a live feed. Your telephone is a hot mic.
Americans would point to legal protections, but the intelligence agencies don’t care. If it can be done it is done. Outside of America you’re open game. The NSA has always put forward that autonomous collection by computers is not ‘surveillance’ and therefore not illegal anyway. Other jurisdictions will be using similar arguments.
Public prosecution is often a news item and sometimes the evidence can be enlightening. E.g. the evidence is a recording of a telephone call years before prosecution even began. It’s a rather mundane prosecution too. Nothing remarkable that would warrant elevation towards state actors and their capabilities.
No they are not. Famously last year it became public knowledge that the built in lawful intercept hardware backdoors across the entire cell phone network and pstn were compromised by “the Chinese”.
FaceTime audio, signal calls and perhaps WhatsApp use encryption in transit, so those backdoors don’t affect them. I don’t know about other data calling methods.
I’ll just place this here: https://techcrunch.com/2024/12/04/fbi-recommends-encrypted-messaging-apps-combat-chinese-hackers/
The access allowed the Chinese hackers to access real-time unencrypted calls and text messages, as well as metadata about who the communications were sent to and from, as they traveled over the phone carriers’ networks.
Your phone call records exist forever and can be accessed pretty easily.
Phone call tapping needs a warrant.
International calls are probably tapped always.
There are also security gaps in cellular systems that allow for less judicial methods of gaining information.
Normal calls, no matter whether via 5G, 4G, 3G, whatever, even phone wire, are not end-to-end encrypted.
Like traditional phone network “phone” calls? Absolutely not. Assume they’re 100% being recorded and fed into an AI model to look for “crimes” and “terrorism” and to classify you.
I could be completely wrong but I believe this was a big outcome from the Patriot Act. Allowing US government to effectively scan every conversation without warrant.
Nah that’s been around in US since at least the late 90s, at least for phone calls
Just assume no but it varies depending on where you live.
For me, conversations are protected, but metadata about the call is not. But even with that, phone apps can record, analyse, and transcribe calls between your voice and the phone service providers.
There are of course the government forms of interception too.
I left WhatsApp and joined signal instead. I did notify most people but two years later not many have left WhatsApp. I do have a more quieter life. Some friends thought I’d ghosted them. Others thought I’d passed away. But to be honest, speaking to friends who work in secure comms companies, there is no such thing as privacy. Everyone in power has access to everyone’s messages and private lives
My friend is in IT/security and has helped me a lot on creating privacy with my data but mostly just laughs and is very discouraging when he sees me trying to hard. He knows what a waste of time it can be.
Regular phone calls can be intercepted by state actors and police if they have a warrant (or even without one if you live in Russia, or similar countries).
Phone calls on Signal are encrypted and cannot be intercepted unless one of the parties has a backdoor on their phone, which is the modi operandi of the authorities if they want to intercept such calls.
I live in Italy, planning to move to another EU country, idk how it is here
