Discussion
So if you initiate the phone-to-phone Signal account transfer process, and it almost completes, such that the account is transferred, but the data isn't, and then errors out ... and if you didn't have backups enabled ... then your entire chat history just vanishes into thin air with zero recourse. In other words, Signal nukes your history from orbit on the old phone before validating that it actually successfully transferred to the new phone.
I am indescribably angry right now.
@tychotithonus
You have that extra insurance though have you not?
@ada I absolutely did not, because I valued having the data secure only locally, and didn't understand the backup trade-offs. I trusted that the mechanism provided would either work, or fail gracefully. It never occurred to me that it would happily purge all data without confirmation of successful transfer. Since that failure mode is clearly very well known to the developers, the app should have screamed that at the user in all caps, prior to requiring double confirmation to move forward.
@tychotithonus Your local signal back is encrypted, so it is secured locally.
If you make a copy of that backup into a different folder, it is still secured locally.
What do you mean by you absolutely did not? And what is the backup trade-offs you mentioned?
@ada I didn't have a backup. I wasn't strongly told that it was very important to make sure that I had one prior to initiating the transfer. So I didn't have one. I have never enabled Signal backups. It didn't occur to me that I needed to enable them to protect Signal from ... itself.
@tychotithonus If I understand you correctly, you have been operating without a local backup even before the transfer.
If your app crashed and you need to reinstall somehow, you lose everything.
If you accidentally cleared the app data yourself, you lose everything.
If your storage media has the misfortune to have a bad sector at where your app is stored, you lose everything.
And you expected the transfer itself to somehow generate a local backup for you. Bear in mind, by doing so it creates two copies - one on your new phone one on your old, and one of them would be considered not storing... locally.
Which industry do you work in may I ask?
@ada I did not expect it to do a backup for me. But I think it is table stakes to expect it to communicate the risk. Everyone's risk model is different, but that model must be informed, in the "informed consent" sense.
You're blaming the user for making the wrong risk choice -- when the user didn't have sufficient information to make that choice, because the risk wasn't properly communicated.
@tychotithonus Hey, @Mer__edith, this looks like something that needs a fix right goodamn now...
@tychotithonus Have you contacted @signalapp about this?
Turns out it's already a known issue, but it's buried in their troubleshooting, such that there'd be no reason for someone to look for it until it was already too late.
https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/10075160307482-Troubleshooting-Device-Transfers
@tychotithonus @signalapp That's a major bummer. Sorry to hear that. Hopefully there's something they can do. Good luck.
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