I understand using play payments initially but hopefully eventually there's a way to buy an account without going through google.
https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/commit/7da3357b5...
For an org that pretends to care about privacy you'd imagine there'd be a way to avoid, you know, the biggest privacy invader on the planet.
Just allow monero payments or something. Alongside Google play for the sheep that want to use that.
In terms of what they do with big data there's more evil parties like Palantir but data abuse starts with collecting it, and I would object to it even if Google promised to only use it for good. For me my privacy is already violated when my data is collected, not just when it's abused. And I do consider Google's use of that data abusive, just not in the worst ways.
I've literally registered a Signal account on one of the free SMS sites floating around. Why would spammers choose the payment route over phone numbers? They would just choose the one that's cheaper.
They probably avoided Monero to not attract the additional scrutiny. They don't even accept donations in Monero.
Signal is not robust for metadata protection. Neither do they advertise anonymity. They take steps to protect metadata but it's nothing compared to SimpleX.
If it's "the feds", then how? There's reproducible builds on all platforms except iOS so we know the source code is what's running on our devices. Can you point to the code where the E2EE is compromised?
They are the largest messenger that has E2EE backups by default.