Alyx on Nostr: Olvid offers better privacy than Signal because: * it supports multiple identities, ...

Olvid offers better privacy than Signal because:

* it supports multiple identities, none tied to a real world identity or PII. Signal supports only one identity tied to a phone number;
* it can be installed from F-droid without Google services ; Signal can only be installed from the Google Play Store on Android. Both supports APK, though.
* servers can be decentralized/federated/self-hosted. Signal is centralized and hosted.
* server (message relay) is actually open source. Signal server source code is incomplete, often outdated.
* Servers do not rely on numerous service providers; only the one for the message relay; you can select your own TURN server for calls. Signal on the other hand depends on AWS, Cloudfront and Cloudflare for messaging/attachments.

This was in the previously linked video. Here are the slides if you don't want to listen to it:
https://cfp.pass-the-salt.org/media/pts2025/submissions/7K9MEV/resources/PTS2025-TALK-25-metadata_prot_in_instant_msg_apps_LsHI6ZN.pdf

Signal lies about their security level in two ways:
* inducing a false sense of security by pretending they collect any metadata except the time of account creating and last message retrieval: their infrastructure depends on many subcontractors, none of which make any privacy claims about not collecting data;
* they can silently and selectively disable sealed senders;
* they have a history of ignoring security reports sent to them, sometimes for months or years;
* they obviously can have so much more data than what they pretend, like all metadata regarding group size and management, prekeys requests/refresh, last connection IP address, connection frequency, etc. We have to trust them for not collecting them. That's not security. That's blind trust.

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