I remember a time when visiting a website that opens a javacript dialog box asking for your name so the message “hi <name entered>” could be displayed was baulked at.
Why does signal want a phone number to register? Is there a better alternative?
I remember a time when visiting a website that opens a javacript dialog box asking for your name so the message “hi <name entered>” could be displayed was baulked at.
Why does signal want a phone number to register? Is there a better alternative?
There is a lot of FUD here. It’s just like anti-vaxxers claiming vaccines make you autistic or have microchips in them: they don’t understand what they’re talking about, have different threat models, and are paranoid.
Messages are private on signal and they cannot be connected to you through sealed sender. There have been multiple audits and even government requests for information which have returned only the phone number and last connection time.
Anti Commercial-AI license
No. Signal’s sealed sender has an incoherent threat model and only protects against an honest server, and if the server is assumed to be honest then a “no logs” policy would be sufficient.
Sealed sender is complete security theater. And, just in case it is ever actually difficult for the server to infer who is who (eg, if there are many users behind the same NAT), the server can also simply turn it off and the client will silently fall back to “unsealed sender”. 🤡
The fact that they go to this much dishonest effort to convince people that they “can’t” exploit their massive centralized trove of activists’ metadata is a pretty strong indicator of one answer to OP’s question.
So, they do not need our phone numbers but they still demand it.
Despite this, escaping WhatsApp and Discord, anti-libre software, is more important.