Moxie has explained this over and over again, and comments like this continue to pretend that he hasn't, while re-raising the falsehood that Google sees Signal messages. This is tendentious trolling, not good-faith conversation and debate. Which is why your last comment was flagged off the site.
You're mischaracterizing my claims. GCM allows Google to extract metadata about who you are messaging and when you are messaging them. They then have the capability to reconstruct your social network graph and select you for further targeting via silent updates if needed.
Assuming you are in fact the other newly created account with the random-looking username above, then you explicitly stated that Signal "forces you to send messages over Google servers".
This is straightforwardly false: the user does not send anything over Google servers in the course of using Signal. Signal sends an empty push notification over GCM to users who have received a message; while technically true, to, in a discussion of a messaging platform, refer to empty push notifications as sending "messages over Google servers" is prone to misinterpretation as false statements that the "messages" going over Google servers contain any information about the messages being sent over the messaging platform.
Additionally, the use of GCM only allows Google to extract metadata about when a user receives messages; GCM messages aren't necessary to notify you when you've sent a message, so I'm not sure how you propose that Google can infer when a user sends a message and who that user is messaging. Could you elaborate on this?
And why do you suppose that they're unable to record the wake events? They don't need metadata from Signal: they can make their own, which is precisely what I've been trying to say this entire time. That's enough for them to reconstruct your social graph.
Signal is seemingly built around providing the image of anonymity and security, but has glaring design flaws which negate these.
I'm sorry, I seem to have given the impression that I doubt your ability to play six-degrees-of-Google-breaking-Signal. I do not doubt that. You've ably demonstrated your ability.
