The Hobbyist

Regarding photos, and videos specifically:

I know you said you are starting with selfhosting so your question was focusing on that, but I would like to also share my experience with ente which has been working beautifully for my family, partner and myself. They are truly end to end encrypted, with the source code available on github.

They have reasonable prices. If you feel adventurous you can actually also host it yourself. They have advanced search features and face recognition which all run on device (since they can’t access your data) and it works very well. They have great sharing and collaborating features and don’t lock features behind accounts so you can actually gather memories from people on your quota by just sharing a link. You can also have a shared family plan.

From what I understand, sealed sender is implemented on the client side. And that’s what’s in the github repo.

They have to know who the message needs to go to, granted. But they don’t have to know who the message comes from, hence why the sealed sender technique works. The recipient verifies the message via the keys that are exchanged if they have been communicating with that correspondent before or else it is a new message request.

So I don’t see how they can build social graphs if they don’t know who the sender if all messages are, they can only plot recipients which is not enough.

Signal absolutely can does provide social graphs, message frequency, message times, message size.

Do you have anything to back this up?

and requires phone numbers (meaning your real identity in the US).

This gets shared a lot as a major concern for all services requiring a phone number. It is definitely true that by definition, a phone number is linked to a person’s identity, but in the case of signal, no other information can be derived from it. When the US government requests data for that phone number from Signal, like they occasionally do, the only information Signal provides them with is whether they do have a signal account and when they registered it last and when they last signed in. How is that truly problematic? For all other services which require a phone number, you would have much more information which is where it is truly problematic, say social graph, text messages, media, locations, devices etc. But none of that is accessible by Signal. So literally the only thing signal can say is whether the person has an account, that’s about it. What’s the big deal about it? Clearly the US government already has your phone number because they need it to make the request for Signal, but they gain absolutely no other information.