Perhaps it’s a marketing problem, then. Signal is marketed as a secure and full-featured alternative to things like WhatsApp and iMessage. Most people start reading that sentence after the word “secure”, and then are surprised and disappointed when a device replacement loses all their history.
I think it would be better if Signal more loudly communicated the drawbacks of its encryption approach up-front, warning away casual users before they get a nasty surprise after storing a lot of important data in Signal.
I’ve heard Signal lovers say the opposite—that getting burned with data loss is somehow educational for or deserved by casual users—and I think that’s asinine and misguided. It’s the equivalent of someone saying “ha! See? You were trading away privacy for convenience and relying on service-provider-readable message history as a record all along, don’t you feel dumb?”, to which most users’ will respond “no, now that you’ve explained the tradeoffs…that is exactly how I want it to work; you can use Signal, but I want iMessage”.
It shouldn’t take data loss to make that understood.
I think it would be better if Signal more loudly communicated the drawbacks of its encryption approach up-front, warning away casual users before they get a nasty surprise after storing a lot of important data in Signal.
I’ve heard Signal lovers say the opposite—that getting burned with data loss is somehow educational for or deserved by casual users—and I think that’s asinine and misguided. It’s the equivalent of someone saying “ha! See? You were trading away privacy for convenience and relying on service-provider-readable message history as a record all along, don’t you feel dumb?”, to which most users’ will respond “no, now that you’ve explained the tradeoffs…that is exactly how I want it to work; you can use Signal, but I want iMessage”.
It shouldn’t take data loss to make that understood.