Signal is not another scheme to collect private data and anyone who makes such a claim has their own agenda to push (as you can see from the other comments in this thread made by this person.) Do a bit more research, get a wide variety of opinions, and then decide which factors are most important to you.

It’s the same as WhatsApp in some extent - always promised that they wouldn’t give up your data while they gained traction and then get acquired by Facebook and get forced to.

No, it is not the same. Signal is a registered 501.3(c) non-profit with a public board and cannot just decide to sell themselves and your metadata at some future point. Signal is also making ongoing improvements to protocols and apps to limit the amount of metadata that must be collected or that can be usefully held.

That’s interesting, I didn’t know that. Thanks for correcting me.

> I didn’t know Signal was just another scheme to collect private data

I think that's quite a misstatement, but it is indeed a centralized service.

I don't think they -intentionally- exist to harvest user data. They just create a situation where they can be taken over by an entity that wishes to easily at any point, or maybe they are already tapped by an entity that has dumped their SGX keys and/or is tapping their network traffic to bulk harvest the metadata they helpfully centralize.

The founder of VK had good intentions and was willing to protect his users too. The Russian government replaced him with someone more ethically flexible.

The foundsrs of WhatsApp clearly never intended it to go in the direction it did post acquisition, but it was not their call.

Gathering all users to a single choke point on a single client on a single server infra is irresponsible and unsustainable. We have been here before.