How about no need for a number at all!?!??
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You can change your number
101–110 of 410 posts
Re: You can change your number
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
Applications can't determine when they're uninstalled. Or, not reliably anyway, and not while following platform guidelines. So the question becomes how to tell uninstalled vs left in a drawer, powered down, while on vacation.
They just have to tell you if a message isn't received after a day or two. This is already exposed via the check marks, so it's just something they have to amplify with a notification. Or when you start writing a message to somebody, if they haven't read the last couple messages signal could make that obvious. Etc. Lots of easy fixes.
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Re: You can change your number
#103How about no phone number at all?
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Re: You can change your number
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
signal.org is displayed right next to the title.
Not on the RSS feed without me doing some jiggery to extract it from the link and render it in my reader somehow. But overall this isn't the worst example because it is on their own domain - often it'll be on a medium domain or something that provides no useful context.
I'm fairly sure that medium is treated specially, along with github, twitter, substack, and a few others, in that subdomains are displayed for those platforms.
Certainly this list isn't complete, and just as surely the moderators are open to adding to that list as contenders enter the ring.
Re: You can change your number
#105That's cool. Can I not use a number? Would it be so hard to add a username field? That the default is phone-number based for discovery is a savvy and logical move for adoption. So add it as an optional feature. The conclusion that I immediately arrive to is that this software must be a honeypot of some sort because it makes no sense. Literally zero.
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Re: You can change your number
#106STOP asking for my phone number to use your "secure" app. I don't want to disclose my phone number to any user, platform or any app. Just please STOP.
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Re: You can change your number
#107Not sure why you need a phone number? besides government and/or ad tracking. This is why I use Matrix/Element
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Re: You can change your number
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
They're working on usernames, but what's the privacy concern around using your phone number? Is it to be pseudononymous? My use case for Signal is friends and family, and it was easy to get everyone onboard because we all have each other's phone numbers already and didn't need to build a new list of contacts. It's a drop-in Android-compatible replacement for iMessage.
If I'd be a spying agency I'd do just that - develop "secure" app that would collect unique identity of every user. Verified phone number is a perfect unique ID. "Just give your phone number to us, and don't worry, we won't share it with anyone!". That exactly what Signal does. Until they allow user-created ID's with no link to any identity - the above concern stays.
But a phone number isn't supposed to be secret, it's supposed to be given to people to contact them. I don't see the nefarious use here. Can they determine I'm a Signal user? Sure, but they can get that from IP address, App/Play Store installs, etc.
Re: You can change your number
#109How can I use this without a phone or phone number at all? If I am concerned about privacy, why would I give them that access and information when it's not necessary for the service? Surely they are only trying to gather information on their users. Whether it's being sold, breached, or used for ad targeting, I am not interested. It comes across as a scam. I cannot take seriously any claims made by the company or its…
You can't. Every engineering choice is a compromise. I don't know why everyone assumes that these choices are always malevolent. I guess you can just not use it? Lots of us use it everyday without issues. If you want something that suits all your needs there are PLENTY of libraries out there for you to throw together your own adhoc distributed encrypted messenger. I have done it a couple of times myself just for fun.
Re: You can change your number
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh, I'm surprised, after a decade stating that phone numbers were great for ID.
They're great compared to the alternative of simply storing a plaintext register of every pair of communicating parties on the server, which is how other messengers work. What's "good" about phone numbers is that they're tied clientside to a "buddy list" that everyone already keeps --- their contact list. They don't want phone numbers on the merits of phone numbers.
That's doublespeak. They want phone numbers on the merits of phone numbers being how people's private identities have been registered with their contacts. And no, that's not a great alternative, it's a huge negative.