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You can change your number

signal.org

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Re: You can change your number

#111

Post by e12e »

tapoxi wrote: post #51
usea wrote: post #8

How 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…

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.

> what's the privacy concern around using your phone number?

My phone number identifies my country, my address and my real name - even if I restrict the listing, it's tied to my credit card. It's tied to a sim card with separate geolocation data to the GPS tracking Google does; even if I active signal from eg a pine phone, the number is tied to a 4g base station.

Ed: and its tied to my current place of employment, too.

None of this is needed/wanted for my signal identity (for me or signal).

I could go out of my way to acquire a pseudonymous phone number, but I guess I'd have to be able to use it somehow - which seems pretty hard to keep anonymous. At the very least I'd probably have to pay for it.

Signal should be able to do better than PGP and five mix master hops of 90s-era anonymous email...

Or you get the old problem of those needing actual secure communication using terrorist@phreak.suspicious.net.ru and using signal just for "other" stuff..

Ed: note that this mostly about connecting with people on signal that otherwise might not have my number, than about (almost) random people that have my phone number discovering that I'm on signal.

Re: You can change your number

#112

Post by [deleted] »

usea wrote: post #8

How 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…

[deleted]

Re: You can change your number

#113

Post by ttybird2 »

palata wrote: post #95
iratewizard wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Signal is high up, but matrix is higher in my book.

Genuinely interested: can you elaborate on what metadata the matrix servers have access to? Say, don't they know who I am writing to, when and which groups I belong to? Signal does not, and that's guaranteed by the client code (i.e. no need to trust anything on the server for that).

"and that's guaranteed by the client code"

This is not true. This is not guaranteed even by the "sealed sender" feature that signal has.

Re: You can change your number

#114

Post by pydry »

tptacek wrote: post #92
theamk wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This decision seems pretty crazy to me, especially on the cell phones where a lot of apps require phone book access to function, and there is generally no way to give a different view to different apps. I understand that Signal wants to be blame it all on users, but the practical consequence of their design is that the moment people want to talk to a single person on Whatsapp, they give out Signal contact list to Fac…

Signal having the contact list means that they'd be subject to legal (and extralegal) process to obtain the entire contact list for everybody using the service, which is untenable for them. Again: Signal is not Discord or WhatsApp; these are different services with different primary objectives.

It could be E2E encrypted.

Re: You can change your number

#115

Post by toastercup »

advisedwang wrote: post #66
yusmary wrote: post #45

All that is cool, but I don't want Signal to advertise my presence to anybody that has my phone number when I first log in after a fresh install. I have only a handful of people that know and we negotiated that face to face prior, Signal breaks that trust

Can you explain this a bit more? Am I correct in understanding that you feel it hurts you when your contacts find out that you have signal installed, hence why signal shouldn't do it? What is the impact of someone who has your phone number knowing you are available over Signal? Are there communities out there where someone being on signal is a red flag?

There are subcultures that are not widely accepted where this is an issue. Take the furry subculture as an example. You might not want your family or college pals to see your furry profile picture and pseudonym, but you also might not be aware of the implications of using a messaging service where the primary ID is your phone number. Many people hand out their phone numbers permissively, as historically, they weren't very "personal" on their own - save for identifying your real name. For many people, having/juggling multiple phone numbers to maintain distinct identities is beyond their technical expertise and simply won't happen in most cases (especially on Telegram, where VOIP numbers are prohibited).

I don't know precisely how Signal does things, but I know this can be an issue on Telegram - and I assume they work similarly. I can see a lot of reasons folks might not be fans of phone-number-as-ID, especially when it alerts folks that you've joined, or gives folks who merely possess your phone number an easy way of viewing your profile details.

I think the first quality E2EE messaging service that provides users an alternative to phone-as-ID could give Telegram/Signal (not that the former is necessarily E2EE) a serious run for their money among privacy-conscious users and members of fringe communities.

Re: You can change your number

#116

Post by WrathOfJay »

stavros wrote: post #16

This is a great feature, well done for adding it! However, I'm a bit puzzled as to why seemingly easy bug fixes aren't addressed. There's a longstanding issue with Signal not recognizing that the phone is in a landscape orientation when taking photos, so they're rotated by 90 degrees. I opened an issue[1] and it got closed with a related-but-not-exact workaround. This impacts everyone who takes photos on Android with…

How about listening to a message in portrait, accidentally moving your phone to landscape, and then having the playback stop and lose position in the audio stream. Or how about losing voice recordings constantly? Seriously? I'm baffled at their priority list. Whoever is directing these efforts is asleep at the wheel. The frustration factor using this app in iOS is so goddamn high.

Re: You can change your number

#117

Post by recursive »

jack_pp wrote: post #60
Talanes wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have data on that, or are you just asserting that your personal experience is more universal than their personal experience? I don't think they're totally off-base: I haven't used my phone contact list for personal contacts for most of the last decade. It's just a collection of work contacts that I don't trust enough to add anywhere I actually talk to people.

I'm sorry but do you need data for common sense? Is WhatsApp one of the biggest messaging platforms where people don't talk to their close friends and family? You think discord or other mediums are more popular than iMessage and WhatsApp?

Is any of this stuff more popular than actually calling people? How are people calling? Memorize phone numbers? I'm completely stumped about how someone could use a cellphone for a decade without using a contact list.

Re: You can change your number

#118

Post by ttybird2 »

tapoxi wrote: post #108
Trias11 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Phone numbers are associated with one's real-life identity though.

Re: You can change your number

#119

Post by gojomo »

tptacek wrote: post #92
theamk wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This decision seems pretty crazy to me, especially on the cell phones where a lot of apps require phone book access to function, and there is generally no way to give a different view to different apps. I understand that Signal wants to be blame it all on users, but the practical consequence of their design is that the moment people want to talk to a single person on Whatsapp, they give out Signal contact list to Fac…

Signal having the contact list means that they'd be subject to legal (and extralegal) process to obtain the entire contact list for everybody using the service, which is untenable for them. Again: Signal is not Discord or WhatsApp; these are different services with different primary objectives.

Because the app constantly prompts for contact-list access, Signal's software-on-device definitely has the contact list.

And, that software regularly re-sends that encrypted list to Signal's servers' SGX enclaves for their contact-discovery protocol.

So whether or not Signal, or some entity near/around it, "has" the contact list is a matter of how much users trust Intel™ SGX® (as well as the chain of processes that deliver/update the Signal software on-device.)

Re: You can change your number

#120

Post by novok »

theamk wrote: post #54
tptacek wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This decision seems pretty crazy to me, especially on the cell phones where a lot of apps require phone book access to function, and there is generally no way to give a different view to different apps. I understand that Signal wants to be blame it all on users, but the practical consequence of their design is that the moment people want to talk to a single person on Whatsapp, they give out Signal contact list to Fac…

Back when signal was getting started, using the contact list to bootstrap buddy lists and reduce adoption friction was definitely the right decision. Now they are more established, they can offer the username only version for the %2 that will actually benefit from it. And now that %2 has the cover of a large established user base to blend in as noise.

You have to remember, signal is about E2EE security for EVERYONE, not just nerds. There will imperfect solutions along that path, which also means things like no federation. Signal is very much about being effective vs about being 'right' and ineffective, because when you are king, you can start being right and effective.

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