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You can change your number

signal.org

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Re: You can change your number

#231

Post by athrun »

itake wrote: post #147
XorNot wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Signal doesn't advertise a profile. It advertises a phone number - everything else is data you have locally. It will send a profile picture if you set one but that's it.

Does it advertise your username? If I don't have the name of the contact, will Signal share my username or does it just say "this number in your list has joined signal, and here is their profile?"

My understanding is that your profile username is made visible if:

- the person is in your own contact list

- you create a conversation with them

- you accept a conversation from them

see: https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360007459591

Re: You can change your number

#232

Post by UncleMeat »

SailingSperm wrote: post #197
UncleMeat wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has been discussed literally 1000 times. The alternative is having the server know who is talking to whom. Further, phone numbers provide a valuable bootstrap to connect with people. Other secure messengers have chosen a different design than Signal. This means you can choose the one you prefer.

How about no ph number and only UUIDs- You send a msg that only personA can decrypt - but you broadcast the encrypted message to all contacts /+ random UUIDs ... So signal doesn't know who it was intended for exactly, and only personA gets the information. Of course you'd want the app to only alert users getting the broadcast once a received comm is successfully decrypted, otherwise discard. It's clearly a lot higher…

> You send a msg that only personA can decrypt

How are you going to do this without getting this person's public key? And how are you going to get their public key without asking signal?

Re: You can change your number

#234

Post by crtasm »

Waterluvian wrote: post #19
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…

Signal is eating up 11GB of my iOS space. There is no way to clear it without completely uninstalling and reinstalling. And then the problem just resets and grows again. It’s a ridiculously consequential bug and they don’t seem motivated to even comment. Pretty sad.

Deleting media from chats doesn't relinquish space on iOS?

Re: You can change your number

#235

Post by stjohnswarts »

dylan604 wrote: post #216
charcircuit wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I was thinking more like "Hey discord, please delete all my old data from your databases, everything" not doing it after every "sensitive" conversation.

Re: You can change your number

#237

Post by not2b »

bmarquez wrote: post #46
not2b wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can they tell that a user has uninstalled the app? Does uninstalling send a notification to signal.org?

Uninstalling doesn't send a notification to signal.org, I've previously messaged a few people without getting a response, later realizing they never got it because they switched phones and stopped using Signal without pressing the "Delete Account" button in Signal settings. The workaround is to have the user install+register again, then press delete. https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360007061192-De... > S…

Yes, I expected as much: most users who stop using Signal (because, say, their friends use something else) are more likely to either just stop using it or uninstall the app, without explicitly deleting the account.

Re: You can change your number

#238

Post by Humphrey »

pomian wrote: post #162
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…

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

Yes, on Android - it can replace your SMS app, and uses secure storage so that other apps do not have access to your SMS's.

Re: You can change your number

#239

Post by hestefisk »

hndamien wrote: post #193
godelski wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the real question is what "usernames" will look like. There were hints dropped that this could be stronger than a typical username (like what HN has). I took a poll on reddit[0][1] to see what people wanted. I was rather surprised at how many wanted strong anonymity. I expected that the top choice would be the weak anonymity, where people just have an alternative to phone numbers. But I think if that's what S…

https://getsession.org/ Already does all of these.

The site is down…

Re: You can change your number

#240

Post by Humphrey »

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?

If I remember correctly, Signal was first explained to me as a secure SMS app. That is it stores your SMS's more securely than the stock apps did... and if you were messaging somebody who also used Signal, then you'd be upgraded to an end-to-end encrypted message.

That said, now I'm on iOS, it doesn't let me do that, so I only use it for contacts with Signal.

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