On its 10th anniversary, Signal’s president wants to remind you that the world’s most secure communications platform is a nonprofit. It’s free. It doesn’t track you or serve you ads. It pays its engineers very well. And it’s a go-to app for hundreds of millions of people.
My only gripe with signal, is the use of phone numbers as usernames. Not everyone with whom I want to communicate via signal has a phone number. I understand why they went this route, but wish there was an alternative way.
You can use a username only for finding and adding friends, you only need the phone number to create an account. That’s probably because Signal started as an alternative to Messages (or whatever it was called back then), so you could send SMS if you wanted, or secure messages to friends w/ Signal. The whole point was to be a gentle transition from SMS to private messaging. However, they eventually dropped the SMS feature, but it seems they kept the phone number as username thing.
It kind of sucks, but I think that’s a reasonable limitation since the vast majority of people using this service will have a phone number. You could probably even sign up for a free trial of something (e.g. Google Fi) to sign up for Signal, set up the username, and then drop the phone number service. I don’t know if there are any problems with this, but I don’t think they do anything with your phone number after everything is set up.
I think another reason they use a phone number is that it can mitigate issues with people or bots creating hundred of accounts maybe
Yeah. And I don’t fault them for this route. I just with I could sign up without a phone number. Maybe the username thing is a predecessor to allowing usernam-only registration in the future.
Yeah, hopefully. It would also be awesome to have a web login so I could access messages and whatnot when using someone else’s computer w/o having to install something.
I don’t know what direction they’re going, but I’m honestly okay with the caveats that currently exist.
Google is a very bad choice because it requires a phone number on its own. Also heard that there may be additional KYC.
Are you suggesting you need a phone number to get a phone number from Google Fi?
And yeah, it’ll definitely to KYC, because that’s a federal regulation. My point is that you don’t need the number long-term, so the number will only be associated with you for like a week while the trial period lasts. So sign up for Google Fi trial, create a Signal account, then cancel the trial. That sounds pretty reasonable to me.
Yea. Don’t you need a Google account first to use such a service? Those do need phone numbers to register.
And also KYC is unacceptable in this case, imo. If the number is needed only for a short time, there are similar, non-KYC options like what you would find on kycnot.me.
Yeah, I think you’ll create a Google account as part of the Google Fi account creation process.
If that really bothers you, use a different MVNO. Some offer free trials, but even if not, it’s not too bad to buy a month of service. My provider is Tello, and the minimum service that’ll give you SMS is $5/month. If you’re clever, you can probably also find a VOIP provider that does SMS for really cheap.
My point isn’t that Google Fi specifically is what you should use, just that it’s an example of a service that offers a free trial, so you can sign up for Signal for free.
I get the point, I just said how bad of an example this is, lol
It creeps me the fuck out. I do not get why a service that bills itself as secure needs to know something that can be traced back to my credit card and name. I won’t use Telegram or Signal because of this.
It’s about your posture. Most people who use signal use it to have privacy from governments. They’re not hiding that they use signal, they’re hiding what they write on signal. In this case, using your phone number isn’t a big deal.
Some people, have a tighter posture, which could translate to your position. In that case, something like Briar could fit the bill.
Lastly, security and privacy are not the same thing. Google products are secure, but they are not private. Self hosted sftp, for example, is private, but may not be secure. Signal is definitely secure, at least enough for general and governmental use. So, it seems, is telegram. Signal is more private than telegram in many ways, but it is not the gold standard for privacy (because of its use of phone numbers as usernames), but it is “good enough” for the masses. The balance between good for everyone and zero-knowledge private for everyone is delicate, potentially impossible. Honestly, I don’t know if signal was able to strike that balance perfectly, but they did a much better job than many other services, certainly than those others that are accepted by the masses.
But putting a phone number in immediately exposes protesters to association. Sure, Signal can’t give out the contents of messages, but it still has the chain of contact. So if a government gets hold of this record, legally or otherwise, now you have everyone associated to a suspect phone number/person and can start rounding them up.
It’s the complete antithesis of freedom of association when there’s a record of everyone that you’ve contacted. The contents don’t enter into that problem, and I can’t see why they feel the need to keep this as part of their system. It purposely makes it impossible to use this for something like peaceful protest. So, no, it doesn’t give you privacy from governments, because governments that don’t respect freedom of association will use that information to punish dissidents.
I can’t imagine any reason to use phone numbers except to purposefully keep this chain of association for governments to use. Even Facebook doesn’t require this sort of personal proof, and it’s suspicious as hell.
it doesn’t. they’ve been ordered to hand over data multiple times, and the only thing tied to the phone number they have is 1. time the account has been created and 2. last time the account connected to the server: https://signal.org/bigbrother/