Is it still viable to use Signal for privacy in 2026? It’s centralized, and has had many suspicious occurrences in the past.(Unopen source server code, careless whisper exploit which is still active as far as I know, and the whole mobile coin situation.)
Thoughts?
If you don’t care about sharing your phone number with Signal and a third-party company (Signal refuses to state what company it is) that send the text message with the activation code to you. And if you don’t care that everything will be saved on servers maintained by Amazon in USA.
Then yes, Signal is the right app for you even in 2026.
But if you do care (and you should) about your phone number and the location of your data, you should focus on something more privacy like XMPP (Snikket would be the easiest way to setup your own server) and SimpleX.
XMPP (for an example Snikket) uses OMEMO and OMEMO is based on Signal Protocol.