To get away from US technology, many now recommend moving to Signal. Those people want to get away from US technology. They, just like myself, want to have digital independence from the USA and would rather use something hosted in the EU.

Of course, that makes sense. Don’t give up a whole lot of your data and metadata to the USA. Be less dependent on the USA as a result. But please don’t use Signal.

I don’t want to argue that Signal itself is bad. It’s actually pretty great. It does security really well and minimises metadata a lot.

But here’s the thing: Signal is run by the Signal Foundation. The Signal Foundation is a US non-profit. The USA can just force the Signal Foundation to remove access of certain individuals or countries.

If the USA start sanctioning European countries – which is not that unlikely, as they want to destroy the EU and even already sanction judges at the International Court of Justice – the Signal Foundation will have to comply. They will not be able to oppose their government and support a sanctioned country.

If the USA really want to, they can just unplug the server. They cannot get to your messages, but what they can do is that they can simply take away your ability to send and to receive messages. Nice cryptography, UX and reduction of metadata does not help if the server physically sits in the USA and is plugged into a wall there.

Now, what would be good, is if the Signal Foundation moved itself, and their servers, over to a European country.

Until that happens – if ever – I’ll stick to communication methods that are not hosted in the USA.

I’m interested in seeing what the comments on this post are going to be. Hopefully this will lead to an interesting discussion.