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You can change your number

signal.org

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Re: You can change your number

#211

Post by godelski »

scotty79 wrote: post #169
godelski wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're confusing privacy with anonymity. Privacy is people not being able to read what you are writing. Anonymity is being... anonymous, unknown. Signal is keeping your conversations private but they are not keeping your account anonymous.

My anonimity is huge contributing factor to my sense of privacy. I don't care if you seen my dick if you have no way of knowing it was mine.

I think the question of how to be anonymous is quite hard though. I wouldn't exactly call our usernames here anonymous.

Re: You can change your number

#212

Post by [deleted] »

scotty79 wrote: post #186
pomian wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That looks like a great app. Thanks. Can you send SMS to a regular number with this?

I'm not sure if it's great. It just lets you communicate without endangering valuable resource that your phone number is. > Can you send SMS to a regular number with this? Why would it do that? Every phone has perfectly good sms app. What would that even mean? Using sms as a transport layer? Or making messages passed through internet look like pseudo sms messages to someones phone number?

[deleted]

Re: You can change your number

#213

Post by godelski »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #206
iqanq wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So choose an identifier that does not... identify you. Or choose not to have a username. I assume that that will be an option, since Telegram has it as well.

No, the problem your parent is referring to is that you have the same username in every chat. Discord really suffers from this.

Actually there are two main problems I'm referring to. You identified one of them. If I want to stay anonymous, I'm really asking how to compartmentalize chats and groups of people. We have different identities with different groups and use different names with them.

The other problem is actually the act of sharing a username. If my username is "godelski" then yeah, I can share it on HN and Reddit where I use that username. But now I've deanonymized myself to friends and family who can see that username through Signal. Alternatively, if I have a username "not_godelski" then how do I get in contact with someone on HN while maintaining anonymity? If I use share it under this account then those two names are linked forever and that deanonymizes me. I can't create a new account just to share that name because those groups know me by that name. If I can have an infinite number of usernames, that solves the problem, but this isn't practical (even 5 usernames would be problematic and requires a lot of cognitive load, which is antithetical to Signal's philosophy).

There's also a third problem I don't care as much about but I'd assume Signal does. And that's naming collisions. NYT has a Signal number that allows whistleblowers to contact them. What's stopping me from creating the username NYT_Whistleblower and becoming a honeypot?

Edit: Lots of people are saying you can't share contact without revealing your identity. Does a 1-click link not solve this issue? If I post a signal.me/#one-time-code/jdjkerfe2r3rfwseffre5ge5g then I don't see how that would reveal my identity. (I'm also not a fan of "you can't". I can understand this being unsolved, but it feels like there are solutions to this problem)

Re: You can change your number

#214

Post by YaBomm »

YaBomm wrote: post #185
_joel wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's a universal thing to the portable device that everyone has got in their pocket? I agree it's sucky and really there could be better ways, should be something none trackable and perhaps offer opt-in discovery via phone book. Have the option of decoupling it entirely from the phone. The government can track you a lot easier than pinging via signal btw. A lot easier!

> What's a universal thing to the portable device that everyone has got in their pocket? All phones have internet connectivity... The phone number is completely useless to talk via the internet anyways... > The government can track you a lot easier than pinging via signal btw. A lot easier! I think that it is easier to connect a real-world identity to an internet account when they also have your phone number associat…

No post body was provided.

Re: You can change your number

#215

Post by kdmccormick »

scotty79 wrote: post #186
pomian wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That looks like a great app. Thanks. Can you send SMS to a regular number with this?

I'm not sure if it's great. It just lets you communicate without endangering valuable resource that your phone number is. > Can you send SMS to a regular number with this? Why would it do that? Every phone has perfectly good sms app. What would that even mean? Using sms as a transport layer? Or making messages passed through internet look like pseudo sms messages to someones phone number?

> Why would it do that?

To avoid splitting one's messaging threads between two different apps.

> Every phone has perfectly good sms app.

Eh, I find the default Android SMS app to be lacking. I can't organize threads or mark messages as unread. You know, basic stuff that email apps figured out a long time ago.

Re: You can change your number

#216

Post by dylan604 »

charcircuit wrote: post #140
stjohnswarts wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you request deletion of these? I've never really thought about that before (I don't use discord that much anyway other than hoping on some channels occasionally to help beginners to rust and c++. I guess I'm not giving away too much there :)

Yes, you can.

Are you really going to request that deletion after every single sensitive conversation? That seems dumb. Also, are those deletions tracked? Like, do they say User A requested their conversation with User B and User C be deleted so that Mr Fed can still see that A B and C had that conversation?

There's just so so many places to get tripped up by keeping data rather than just routing bits and never storing them.

Re: You can change your number

#217

Post by lawtalkinghuman »

rcarback wrote: post #136

It is early stage, but there is now an alternative to Signal that doesn't use phone numbers at all: https://xx.network/messenger/ While you can add your number to be searchable by others, it doesn't let strangers with your number know you signed up automatically, either. Full disclosure: I work on the infrastructure behind it.

Became significantly less interested when I saw it had a cryptocurrency attached.

Re: You can change your number

#218

Post by thaumasiotes »

godelski wrote: post #213
thaumasiotes wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the problem your parent is referring to is that you have the same username in every chat. Discord really suffers from this.

Actually there are two main problems I'm referring to. You identified one of them. If I want to stay anonymous, I'm really asking how to compartmentalize chats and groups of people. We have different identities with different groups and use different names with them. The other problem is actually the act of sharing a username. If my username is "godelski" then yeah, I can share it on HN and Reddit where I use that us…

> There's also a third problem I don't care as much about but I'd assume Signal does. And that's naming collisions. NYT has a Signal number that allows whistleblowers to contact them. What's stopping me from creating the username NYT_Whistleblower and becoming a honeypot?

That's easy; you want an internal identifier for Signal accounts that is unrelated to display name. This is already routine in most places including Discord.[1] Nothing stops you from creating the username NYT_Whistleblower, but that won't be what the NYT advertises to potential whistleblowers.

> Alternatively, if I have a username "not_godelski" then how do I get in contact with someone on HN while maintaining anonymity?

Well, you can't. Revealing your identity necessarily involves losing your anonymity, and I don't understand how you think those two actions could be theoretically separated. If you want to share your Signal identity with someone who only knows you as "godelski from HN", then once the sharing is accomplished they will know that "godelski from HN" and "godelski from HN's Signal username" are the same person. So will anyone who was allowed to watch the sharing.

Perhaps what you want is a single buffer account, where you tell people on HN to contact your buffer account (openly identifying it with yourself), and then you use the buffer account to reveal the identity of your actual account?

[1] Note that there is a tension between having a unique identifier by which Signal knows who you are, and the need for participants in two group chats not to be able to notice that your two usernames in those two chats belong to the same person. Discord is failing at this. To be part of a group chat at all, someone is going to have to have an identifier for you; if you want to maintain cross-chat anonymity, you'll need to be able to generate disposable identifiers that you can give to chat admins.

Re: You can change your number

#219

Post by odjebioff »

scotty79 wrote: post #67

Why would supposedly secure communicator use actual phone number as identifier is beyond me. And everybody does that, either phone number or email. The only software I could find for anonymous communication was old Polish communicator http://gg.pl which uses arbitrary numbers as identifiers I understand that startups are scared that they won't be able to build up userbase from scratch but come on! Discord and Slack d…

Try Threema then, they don’t require email nor phone

Re: You can change your number

#220

Post by yazaddaruvala »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #206
iqanq wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So choose an identifier that does not... identify you. Or choose not to have a username. I assume that that will be an option, since Telegram has it as well.

No, the problem your parent is referring to is that you have the same username in every chat. Discord really suffers from this.

It seems like you don't want user id as much as you want searchable user aliases (or persona ids). Basically, a private id (linking your clients), where there are multiple public persona ids for "searching" and adding people to conversations.

Users in conversations are linked by (private id and the persona id at creation), where messages get sent between the clients.

Meanwhile, people (or rather private ids) get added to conversations by using the publicly searchable personas (i.e. any globally unique string). Then for the life of that conversation, the persona is sticky. You could even add multiple personas from the same user to the same conversation if that is necessary. For some the persona id could be phone numbers, full names, online aliases, emails, etc.

People can then hand out different personas depending on the context.

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