I’m torn on it. I love that everything is geared towards privacy, but location sharing seems to go against the grain of the program’s principles.
I’d make use of it if it was included, but I understand why it doesn’t and Google Maps does a similar thing.
Location showing only goes against privacy If it’s not done right.
It’s expensive to encrypt it and forward it through the servers or proxies, but revealing if done peer to peer. (And less reliable)
But by the time I’m giving “live location” I don’t think my ip address is THAT private 😝
How is location expensive to encrypt? I share my location all the time but to do that I have to write an entire sentence to other people where I am. Just introduce a new message type (like with edits) frontend to enable location sharing. Location is sent every 5min or if the other person requests an update, than location is updated again (send location update request message to trigger response on the other side). Same encryption as everything else and easy to implement. Of course the devil is in the detail but the basis are trivial.
The “hardest” part would be to show the location on a map without leaking data but just add a warning dialog and open externally. Every link in Signal you press has the same privacy issues.
Encryption isn’t hard, the service to stream live data over an hour is what costs money.
Continuous data
Oh I totally get why it’s useful, but it seems sharing more than intended goes against the privacy-focussed principle of the app.
Though I do now see that if done correctly, it could be a bonus.
The purpose of an app like Signal is specifically to be able to share stuff with people.
What makes it private is that you are in full control over who can see what you send. You’re arguing that for something to be private it must prevent you from sending what you want to send.