I broadly agree. We tend to get caught up in Signal vs Session vs whatever, but at the end of the day they’re just means to an end. The important thing is:
- People being aware of various privacy-invasive practices we’re exposed to every day to at least some level of accuracy and detail; and
- People being aware that things do not have to be this way, and they can change things. This can be through using certain tools, or lobbying for better laws, or whatever, but this second part is really important.
The privacy “community” has a tendency to get a bit ‘in the weeds’ with 2 I think - we can argue all day long about how WhatsApp is worse than Signal, and it’s important to keep up to date to changes which make X tool trustworthy or not - but at the end of the day we need to be careful not to make things look impossible, or gloss over marginal improvements. If I could get every one of my friends to use Signal rather than SMS or Discord, I’d be absolutely thrilled! Yes, Signal has downsides, but nobody is seriously arguing it’s not better than SMS or Facebook Messenger or whatever dodgy Discord is or is not up to this week.
I talk to people about this stuff quite a lot, and one response I get all the time is basically “oh, it’s too late for me, I got caught up in X data breach/I have a Facebook account/my friends have no ability to keep things quiet” so they don’t see any point in marginal changes. I generally try to gently encourage them towards security practices like using a password manager (either Bitwarden or Keepass), emphasising the security and convenience benefits, rather than talking about informational privacy concepts. I don’t know how much I’ve actually changed people’s minds, but it’s better than wallowing in the weeds of helplessness or getting caught up in frankly irrelevant arguments about X kinds of metadata etc.