I remember a time when visiting a website that opens a javacript dialog box asking for your name so the message "hi " could be displayed was baulked at.
Why does signal want a phone number to register? Is there a better alternative?
Why does Signal want a phone number to register if it's supposedly privacy first?
a year ago by 0101100101 to c/privacy
autonomoususer -54 points a year ago
Our phone numbers are not private from them.
Despite this, escaping WhatsApp and Discord, anti-libre software, is more important.
onlinepersona 26 points a year ago
Nothing "derailing" us. Not everyone has the same threat model. The messages are private and that's what's most important. Signal can only provide phone number and last connection time to the feds. If that's too much information for you, then you're not the target group and have a different threat model.
0101100101 -16 points a year ago
The messages are private and that’s what’s most important.
No, that isn't true. WhatsApp has the same lies. Law enforcement connect communication between users at key times and use it as credible evidence. Why would drug exporter 1 be communicating with drug buyer 1 at the exact time the delivery arrives in the country? Law enforcement doesn't need to know what was written.
onlinepersona 5 points a year ago
What are you talking about? Are you saying sealed sender is a lie? If so, I want some proof.
aprehendedmerlin 93 points a year ago
Spam prevention
foremanguy92_ -10 points a year ago
It's not an argument. Think about regular mobile numbers, are they preventing spams? No.
Scolding7300 9 points a year ago path: 0 16992178 16993985 16997869, hotness: undefined, score: 9, children: 3
foremanguy92_ 3 points a year ago
Scams, girls wanting to chat with you, incredible money opportunities...
Scolding7300 1 point a year ago path: 0 16992178 16993985 16997869 16998800 17009411, hotness: undefined, score: 1, children: 0
Scolding7300 1 point a year ago path: 0 16992178 16993985 16997869 16998800 17009480, hotness: undefined, score: 1, children: 0
onlinepersona 4 points a year ago
Are you seeing spam on signal? Do you even know why spam is possible on phone networks and what the difference is between phone networks and the internet?
foremanguy92_ 3 points a year ago
I don't know what is spam for you, but when you get three message requests from three girls respectively named Tania, Clara and Ella that are contacting you about you carrier or your management skills, I call it spam.
The way that Signal integrates phone number is odd because it opens up the spam door. O understand why Signal use phone numbers this way (to make "normies" adopt Signal more easily like WhatsApp would do) but it not the best to kind of contaminate the network with the traditional cell network
detun3d 3 points a year ago
The point, I believe, wasn't about spam but likely got derailed. It was probably about the phone number requirement being unnecessary. I'll just add that even if it is, it's a measure geared towards common users that often need to recover access to their accounts through means they're already familiar with, as is a verification SMS. It's not the safest nor the most private, but it's easier to deal with for most people. Whoever wants something that doesn't depend on a SIM or eSIM should try Briar and SimpleX. None of these will be a perfect solution for every single person though.
autonomoususer -54 points a year ago
Our phone numbers are not private from them.
Despite this, escaping WhatsApp and Discord, anti-libre software, is more important.
solrize 6 points a year ago
Are you saying I have to literally rebuild and distribute my own client APK if I want to use my own server? There's no "settings" in the existing client where you say what server you want to use, like every email client has? That sounds obnoxious.
xthexder 17 points a year ago
If you don't trust Signal to run an unmodified server without malicious modifications, then why would you trust their build of the APK?
To truly be safe from Signal's influence you would need to audit the source code and build it yourself.
Personally I have no problem using Signal's servers
interdimensionalmeme 2 points a year ago
How? i wanted to do that but the client doesn't let you use another server? Host file ?
ganymede 2 points a year ago
edit: nvm i re-read what you wrote
i agree it does mostly fulfill the criteria for libre software. perhaps not in every way to the same spirit as other projects, but that is indeed a separate discussion.
h̶o̶w̶ ̶m̶a̶n̶y̶ ̶c̶o̶m̶m̶u̶n̶i̶t̶i̶e̶s̶ ̶a̶r̶e̶ ̶d̶o̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶t̶h̶a̶t̶ ̶r̶i̶g̶h̶t̶ ̶n̶o̶w̶?̶ ̶i̶ ̶s̶u̶s̶p̶e̶c̶t̶ ̶y̶o̶u̶ ̶m̶a̶y̶ ̶b̶e̶ ̶d̶r̶a̶s̶t̶i̶c̶a̶l̶l̶y̶ ̶u̶n̶d̶e̶r̶s̶t̶a̶t̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶b̶a̶r̶r̶i̶e̶r̶s̶ ̶f̶o̶r̶ ̶t̶h̶a̶t̶.̶ ̶b̶u̶t̶ ̶w̶o̶u̶l̶d̶ ̶b̶e̶ ̶d̶e̶l̶i̶g̶h̶t̶e̶d̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶b̶e̶ ̶p̶r̶o̶v̶e̶n̶ ̶w̶r̶o̶n̶g̶.̶.̶.̶
rottingleaf 5 points a year ago
The barrier is that only you and your friends would be using that Fignal or Xignal or whatever home installation, and for that practically, for ease of use, it's simpler to host Matrix which even a complete idiot can do.
autonomoususer 2 points a year ago
Agreed, escaping WhatsApp and Discord is the most important part.
southsamurai 50 points a year ago
Everything is a balancing act. Privacy, anonymity, and security aren't the same things. They're sometimes, and in some aspects always, difficult to achieve without compromising one of the other two.
When you add in the goal of quick, easy setup to make the service useful in the first place. Doesn't matter how good the service is at the trinity if nobody is willing to use it. Signal just errs on security first, privacy second, anonymity third.
Xanza 45 points a year ago
So, you're going to get two schools of thought on this, and one of them is wrong. Horrendously wrong. For perspective, I was a certified CEHv7, so take that for what its worth.
There's a saying in security circles "security through obscurity isn't security," which is a saying from the 1850s and people continually attempt to apply the logic to today's standards and it's--frankly stupid--but just plain silly. It generally means that if you hide the key to your house under the floor mat, there's no point to having the lock, because it doesn't lend you any real security and that if you release the schematics to security protocols and/or devices (like locks), it makes them less secure. And in this specific context, it makes sense and is an accurate statement. Lots of people will make the argument that F/OSS is more secure because it's openly available and many will make the argument that it's less secure. But each argument is moot because it deals with software development and not your private data. lol.
When you apply the same logic to technology and private data it breaks down tremendously. This is the information age. With a persons phone number I can very likely find their home address or their general location. Registered cell phones will forever carry with them the city in which they were activated. So if I have your phone number, and know your name is John Smith, I can look up your number and see where it was activated. It'll tell me "Dallas, Texas" and now I'm not just looking for John Smith, I'm looking for John Smith in Dallas, Texas. With successive breakdowns like this I will eventually find your home address or at the very least your neighborhood.
The supposition made by Signal (and anyone who defends this model) is that generally anyone with your private number is supposed to have it and even if they do, there's not much they can do with it. But that's so incredibly wrong it's not even funny in 2025.
I've seen a great number of people in this thread post things like "privacy isn't anonymity and anonymity isn't security," which frankly I find gobstopping hilarious from a community that will break their neck to suggest everyone run VPNs to protect their online identity as a way to protect yourself from fingerprinting and ad tracking.
It frankly amazes me. Protecting your data, including your phone number is the same as protecting your home address and your private data through redirection from a VPN. I don't think many in this community would argue against using a VPN. But why they feel you should shotgun your phone number all over the internet is fucking stupid, IMO, or that you should only use a secure messaging protocol to speak to people you know, and not people you don't know. It's all just so...stupid.
They'll then continue to say that you should only use Signal to talk to people you know because "that's what its for!" as if protecting yourself via encryption from compete fucking strangers has no value all of a sudden. lol
You have to be very careful in this community because there are a significant number of armchair experts which simply parrot the things that they've read from others ad-nauseam without actually thinking about the basis of what they're saying.
OK. That's my rant. I'm ready for your downvote.
Manalith 16 points a year ago
The only thing I'll tack onto this is that with the introduction of Signal usernames, you still have to give Signal your number to verify that at least on some level, you probably are a real person. As someone with 5 different phone numbers, probably doesn't stop spam as much as they'd hoped, but more than they feared, but at least now you don't have to give that Craigslist guy who uses Signal your phone number, just your username. Is that the best method? I dunno, but but it is something.
Xanza 12 points a year ago
I was unaware of this change, and it's perfectly acceptable. No one has any ground to lambast Signal for requiring phone numbers to get an account. I think that's a perfectly reasonable spam mitigation technique. The issue is having to shotgun your phone number to every Howard and Susan that you want to use Signal to communicate with.
This was honestly the only thing holding me back from actually using Signal. I'll likely register for an account now.
Jason2357 1 point a year ago
At least in theory, this is mitigated. The signal activation server sees your phone number, yes. If you use Signal, the threat model doesn't protect you from someone with privileged network or server access learning that you use Signal (just like someone with privileged network access can learn you use tor, or a vpn, etc).
But the signal servers do not get to see the content of your group messages, nor the metadata about your groups and contacts. Sealed sender keeps that private: https://signal.org/blog/sealed-sender/
You would obviously want to join those groups with a user Id rather than your phone number, or a malicious member could out you. It's not the best truly anonymous chat platform, but protection from your specific threat model is thought through.
edit: be sure to go to Settings > Privacy > Phone Number. By default anyone who already has your phone number can see you use signal (used for contact discovery, this makes sense to me for all typical uses of Signal), and in a separate setting, contacts and groups can see your phone number. You will absolutely want to un-check that one if you follow my suggestion above.
MDCCCLV 1 point a year ago
Spam accounts are clearly the biggest factor for not letting anyone just sign up with an email. Although getting a new email without a phone verification is getting increasingly hard now.
JackbyDev 36 points a year ago
Signal fills an incredibly important spot in a spectrum of privacy and usability where it's extremely usable without sacrificing very much privacy. Sure, to the most concerned privacy enthusits it's not the best, but it's a hell of a lot easier to convince friends and family to use Signal than something like Matrix.
pineapplelover 35 points a year ago
Bots. If it makes you feel better, you can disable other people finding you via phone number and just give them your username. All messages are private.
0101100101 -16 points a year ago
But the police request the meta data of all messages from your phone number that the company has and they're required by law to give them it.
pineapplelover 47 points a year ago
These are all the court orders Signal has complied to and details all the information they give up
https://signal.org/bigbrother/
TLDR; they only give the last time the account connected to Signal servers and the time of account registration or re-registration
devfuuu 23 points a year ago
You should go properly read the requests from law enforcement they have received and exactly what information it contains. It's public. Then evaluate if it matters for yur threat model. Security doesn't exist in a vaccum.
plz1 11 points a year ago
They can "request" it all day long. Signal doesn't store them beyond the time needed to deliver to the end user device, and while (temporarily) stored, it's encrypted in a way Signal's service cannot read.
0101100101 -5 points a year ago
huh? so the phone number is encrypted in a way that can't be read, but an sms is sent to the phone? ... a separate company sends the text on behalf of signal? so that separate company logs the phone number, the timestamp and who knows what else.
xthexder 6 points a year ago
Signal doesn't use SMS anymore, and all messages are sent over encrypted Internet protocol. Any servers in between won't see the phone number, it's not needed to deliver the message, it's using an IP address at that point and the entire message metadata is encrypted. Signal is the only one that can see the phone numbers, which they use to identify multiple clients as a single user and route messages accordingly.
plz1 2 points a year ago
Signal doesn't use SMS at all, once you have enrolled. The phone number is used to validate people and exclude bots, during registration. As others have noted, you can hide your number from other users, as well.
JackbyDev 0 points a year ago
What are you on about right now? I don't mean that sarcastically, I really am wondering what your concern is. Are you concerned that because your phone number is associated with Signal that police will know you use Signal?
ryannathans 9 points a year ago
Secret sender stops any real amount of information about messages being connected to you
winkerjadams 9 points a year ago
Its encrypted
CosmicTurtle0 -4 points a year ago
Messages are e2e encrypted. Metadata is not encrypted.
Edit: I feel the need to qualify this statement. Metadata about your connection may be encrypted at rest but is decryptable given that signal is released metadata to authorities with a warrant/subpoena.
rottingleaf 5 points a year ago
People told you a few times to go look for yourself what Signal can give away. Its protocol descriptions are pretty understandable.
The whole bloody reason it's always recommended is because it's absolutely the best thing in terms of yes, encrypting metadata. It's state of the art, level above that bullshit you're thinking.
Unfortunately, that also means that hosting it takes lots of resources, which means they have to screen bots and mults somehow. Phone numbers are one way. Paid accounts are another.
XenGi 31 points a year ago
One of the design goals is that they don't have a user database, so governments etc can't knock down their door demanding anything. By using phone numbers your "contacts" are not on their servers but local on your phone.
autonomoususer -4 points a year ago
You are not the only person using Signal.
0101100101 -10 points a year ago
and then every phone number on your phone by arresting you and searching your phone.
rirus 4 points a year ago
That's WRONG they have a Database of every Phone number registered to them and metadata like the last time they logged in. You send all your contacts numbers to signal so they can respond who is also using Signal.
0101100101 -23 points a year ago
During registration they want a phone number to send a verification code. I know I am me. They don't need to verify that.
rottingleaf 3 points a year ago
Signal's internal identifiers are, of course, not phone numbers. And you can download their server and host it without requiring phone numbers for registration. Just they simply can't afford it, they need to prevent bots from registering and sending messages somehow. A group message is stored in Signal as many times as there are group members, for example.
IttihadChe 2 points a year ago
They need to verify using a phone number because otherwise other people could sign up using your phone number and pretend to be you? What?
They can only sign up using your phone number if they do require a phone number. If they didn't ask for a phone number then how would people sign up using your phone number?
autonomoususer 1 point a year ago path: 0 16992351 16992388 16992682 16995215, hotness: undefined, score: 1, children: 0
0101100101 -8 points a year ago
... but why require numbers in the first place.
rottingleaf 27 points a year ago
Yes, and in that time you would visit a website with your own IP address likely, likely over HTTP without SSL/TLS, likely with your vulnerable browser fingerprint. Point?
Privacy, not anonymity. Two completely different things.
Because the way Signal is built hosting it requires a lot of resources (storage especially), so they want spam prevention and fewer accounts per person.
solrize 6 points a year ago
I haven't seen a non-TLS website in years.
Your asserting "two completely different things" doesn't make it true. Privacy and anonymity are not synonyms but they are overlapping areas. Also ISTM you are redefining terms to suit your purposes. Anonymity to me means the message recipient can't tell who you are. If a THIRD PARTY (the server operator) can ALSO tell who you are, that's a privacy failure, not just an anonymity one.
Why does it take so much storage per user? Does it have video uploads or anything like that? A user account should basically just be a row in a database.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signal_(software) :
In August 2022, Signal notified 1900 users that their data had been affected by the Twilio breach including user phone numbers and SMS verification codes.[105] At least one journalist had his account re-registered to a device he did not control as a result of the attack.[106] ...
This mandatory connection to a telephone number (a feature Signal shares with WhatsApp, KakaoTalk, and others) has been criticized as a "major issue" for privacy-conscious users who are not comfortable with giving out their private number.[142] A workaround is to use a secondary phone number.[142] The ability to choose a public, changeable username instead of sharing one's phone number was a widely-requested feature.[142][144][145] This feature was added to the beta version of Signal in February 2024.[146]
Using phone numbers as identifiers may also create security risks that arise from the possibility of an attacker taking over a phone number.[142] A similar vulnerability was used to attack at least one user in August 2022, though the attack was performed via the provider of Signal's SMS services, not any user's provider.[105] The threat of this attack can be mitigated by enabling Signal's Registration Lock feature, a form of two-factor authentication that requires the user to enter a PIN to register the phone number on a new device.[147]
3abas 6 points a year ago
They are overlapping areas, but they are "two completely different things". They overlap by sharing common goals, not by being interchangeable.
Anonymity to me means the message recipient can't tell who you are.
Right. And Signal doesn't provide that at all, it ties your private messages to your identity (phone number), it explicitly does not provide anonymity. In fact, it proudly advertises you as a signal user to other signal users that have your number saved. It allows you to post public status updates, it encourages you to save your first and last name on your account.
If a THIRD PARTY (the server operator) can ALSO tell who you are, that's a privacy failure, not just an anonymity one.
Okay? And? In this hypothetical world where Signal offered anonymity but still tied you to your number for other practical reasons, then you're be correct that it would be a privacy concern.
But they don't offer anonymity, they offer private conversations.
solrize 3 points a year ago
They are overlapping areas, but they are “two completely different things”. They overlap by sharing common goals, not by being interchangeable.
They aren't interchangeable but they intersect. Completely different means they are disjoint.
it proudly advertises you as a signal user to other signal users
That sounds terrible, a private message service shouldn't advertise anything to anyone. If I subscribe to a subversive magazine, it shouldn't advertise me to other subscribers. It's a terrible invasion if they do. Signal and PGP are both comparable to subversive magazines in that regard, even if the PGP manual tried to say the opposite.
I think most of us these days recognize that the whole concept of public key directories and signature chains on PGP keys was a conceptual error in how people thought about privacy back then (they only cared about encrypting message content). We like to think we know better now, but maybe we don't.
Okay? And? In this hypothetical world where Signal offered anonymity but still tied you to your number for other practical reasons, then you’re be correct that it would be a privacy concern.
According to Wikipedia, they do record some of that info and report it to the government when required. In fact there is further disclosure to them (they might not retain or use the info, but they do receive it) every time you connect to the Signal server.
Anyway the Wikipedia article indicates they have introduced usernames as an alternative to phone numbers, so they have finally acknowledged the problem and done something about it.
rottingleaf 1 point a year ago
- When people would complain about JS on webpages, they were not.
- Completely different things overlap all the time.
- Because your status updates and messages are encrypted and stored (until retrieved, of course) once for every recipient, and that includes your other devices and their other devices.
solrize 1 point a year ago
Because your status updates and messages are encrypted and stored (until retrieved, of course) once for every recipient, and that includes your other devices and their other devices.
I'd like to see a numerical estimate of how much data this is. But, it sounds to me like more reason to want to self-host.
I don't see any point to rehashing the other stuff. Non-TLS websites mostly went away once DNS spoofing at wifi hotspots became widespread.
rottingleaf 1 point a year ago
But, it sounds to me like more reason to want to self-host.
So do that. You can do that with Signal.
I don’t see any point to rehashing the other stuff. Non-TLS websites mostly went away once DNS spoofing at wifi hotspots became widespread.
Maybe I wasn't clear, someone said that back in the day registration on a website was a new and bad thing, connecting it with privacy and comparing to Signal asking for phone number. I answered with the idea that not much commonly thought from that time about privacy has aged well. You wouldn't register on websites, but you would communicate with them over plaintext. I hope that makes it clearer.
autonomoususer 0 points a year ago
Our phone numbers are not private from them.
Despite this, escaping WhatsApp and Discord, anti-libre software, is more important.
0101100101 -22 points a year ago
- yawn, vpns are a thing and strawman argument. point?
- my number is private. point?
- bs. spam is easy to detect across a large number of accounts using simpleheuristics. point?
rottingleaf 3 points a year ago
- they were talking of something like year 2003, when they were commonly not.
- no, PSTN is not private.
- for something end-to-end encrypted, including message metadata (not connection metadata), this statement seems amazingly stupid ; "simple heuristics" are usually used on something like plaintext e-mail.
0101100101 0 points a year ago
- no they weren't. no moving of goalposts
- what's my number then?
- amazingly not stupid. dunning kruger and all that.
rottingleaf 1 point a year ago
- People were complaining about JS existing when SSL and TLS were not omniscious. If we disagree on that fact, move on.
- A sequence of digits.
- OK, what are your "simple heuristics" for a bunch of pieces of ciphertext with unknown sender (except for IP addresses) in your storage to pick spammers from that?
Adderbox76 12 points a year ago
It’s not designed to be an anonymous service, just a private one.
I think this needs to be said a lot more often and a lot louder. Anonymous and private are NOT necessarily the same thing, nor should the expectation be that they are. Both have a purpose.
shortwavesurfer 23 points a year ago
SimpleX
MajesticElevator 4 points a year ago
I hope it gets multi device support and sync one day, in a way that just works
cypherpunks 3 points a year ago
You can just make a group for each contact with all of your (and their) devices in it.
MajesticElevator 5 points a year ago
It’s still a shitty workaround
If people contact me, I can’t expect them to create a group..
cypherpunks 3 points a year ago
You can configure one or more of your profiles' addresses to be a "business address" which means that when people contact you via it it will always create a new group automatically. Then you can (optionally, on a per-contact basis) add your other devices' profiles to it (as can your contact with their other devices, after you make them an admin of the group).
It's not the most obvious/intuitive system but it works well and imo this paradigm is actually better than most systems' multi-device support in that you can see which device someone is sending from and you can choose to give different contacts access to a different subset of your devices than others.
pwalker 19 points a year ago
The amount of trolls in this thread that either try to spew false information intentionally or just have no idea what they are talking about is insane.
If you are worried about what data (including your phone number) law enforcement can recieve (if they have your specific user ID, which is not equal to your phone number) from the Signal company check this: https://propertyofthepeople.org/... Tldr: It's the date of registration and last time user was seen online. No other information, Signal just doesn't have any other and this is by design.
If you want to know more about how they accomplish that feat you can check out the sealed sender feature: https://nerdschalk.com/...
or the private contact discovery system: https://signal.org/blog/private-contact-discovery/
Also as Signal only requires a valid phone number for registration you might try some of these methods (not sure if they still work): https://theintercept.com/...
autonomoususer 2 points a year ago
This shows they do not need our phone numbers but they still demand it.
Despite this, escaping WhatsApp and Discord, anti-libre software, is more important.
Undertaker 2 points a year ago
No it doesn't. What is a need? It is for troll and spam and bot protection. How does the links show that there is no need for it?
cypherpunks 0 points a year ago
path: 0 17003765 17004183, hotness: undefined, score: 0, children: 9
edit: it's funny how people downvoting comments about signal's sealed sender being a farce never even attempt to explain what its threat model is supposed to be. (meaning: what attacks, with which adversary capabilities specifically, is it designed to prevent?)
pwalker -1 points a year ago
it's being answered in the github thread you linked. Sorry that this is not enough for you but it's enough for most people: "For people who are concerned about this sort of thing, you can enable sealed sender indicators in the settings"
cypherpunks 6 points a year ago
it’s being answered in the github thread you linked
The answers there are only about the fact that it can be turned off and that by default clients will silently fall back to "unsealed sender".
That does not say anything about the question of what attacks it is actually meant to prevent (assuming a user does "enable sealed sender indicators").
This can be separated into two different questions:
- For an adversary who does not control the server, does sealed sender prevent any attacks? (which?)
- For an adversary who does control the server, how does sealed sender prevent that adversary from identifying the sender (via the fact that they must identify themselves to receive messages, and do so from the same IP address)?
The strongest possibly-true statement i can imagine about sealed sender's utility is something like this:
For users who enable sealed sender indicators AND who are connecting to the internet from the same IP address as some other Signal users, from the perspective of an an adversary who controls the server, sealed sender increases the size of the set of possible senders for a given message from one to the number of other Signal users who were online from behind the same NAT gateway at the time the message was sent.
This is a vastly weaker claim than saying that "by design" Signal has no possibility of collecting any information at all besides the famous "date of registration and last time user was seen online" which Signal proponents often tout.
autonomoususer -4 points a year ago
Downvoted as you let them bait you. Escaping WhatsApp and Discord, anti-libre software, is more important.
cypherpunks 5 points a year ago
Downvoted as you let them bait you. Escaping WhatsApp and Discord, anti-libre software, is more important.
I don't know what you mean by "bait" here, but...
Escaping to a phone-number-requiring, centralized-on-Amazon, closed-source-server-having, marketed-to-activists, built-with-funding-from-Radio-Free-Asia (for the specific purpose of being used by people opposing governments which the US considers adversaries) service which makes downright dishonest claims of having a cryptographically-ensured inability to collect metadata? No thanks.
(fuck whatsapp and discord too, of course.)
autonomoususer -1 points a year ago
When it's libre software, we're not banned from fixing it.
Core_of_Arden 19 points a year ago
I think it's important to remember de difference between being private and being anonymous. Signal IS private. It's not anonymous. The same is true for many other apps/services.
Personally I like to be private. I don't really need to be anonymous.
autonomoususer 16 points a year ago
Signal is not perfect but we control its app, libre software. See SimpleX Chat.
Escaping WhatsApp and Discord, anti-libre software, is more important.
celia 9 points a year ago
What SimpleX, Signal, or any app like this need first and foremost is traction, as new users generate more new users. One of Signal's goals is usability (usually achieved by being simple, as in no complexity for the end user). In my opinion SimpleX lacks that. This is the same reason Signal needs a phone number: populating your contact list with users already on the platform
autonomoususer -11 points a year ago
reason Signal needs a phone number: populating your contact list
Wrong, it is not optional.
Despite this, escaping WhatsApp and Discord, anti-libre software, is more important.
foremanguy92_ 2 points a year ago
You can go to Simplex (for sure a lot of people here already done it) but if only privacy nerds get to this place this is not a great solution. We (I'm talking about us using Lemmy and chatting on SimpleX) must convince people, starting by friends and family to stop using these fucking socials then at this point SimpleX will be considered as a viable alternative
autonomoususer 0 points a year ago path: 0 16993142 16993877 16994031 16994110, hotness: undefined, score: 0, children: 0
autonomoususer -10 points a year ago
Escaping WhatsApp and Discord, anti-libre software, is more important.
Avenging5 16 points a year ago
path: 0 16999139, hotness: undefined, score: 16, children: 4
Offers the same privacy but is not centralised. it's peer to peer
0101100101 1 point a year ago
But like TOR, can entry / exit nodes be used to tie the two ends together through e.g. timing attacks?
autonomoususer 3 points a year ago
Has any app fixed this?
dai 6 points a year ago
Simplex?
autonomoususer 1 point a year ago
I fogot it does that.
coconut 12 points a year ago
If you want to be mainstream a) you can't have spammers, scammers, and all the other scum of the earth and b) finding your contacts in the app HAVE TO be plug and play. Literally no normie will bother adding with usernames or whatever.
autonomoususer -13 points a year ago
finding your contacts
Wrong, it is not optional, does not stop spam and the worst way to try.
Do not let this derail us. Escaping to libre software is the best return on investment.
rottingleaf 6 points a year ago
Do not let this derail us.
Nothing is derailing you personally. Why are you repeating this to others?
autonomoususer 1 point a year ago
To avoid any misunderstanding discouraging others from using Signal over apps like WhatsApp, while commenting on areas where it could improve. Privacy has never been single player.
autonomoususer 1 point a year ago
Wrong, they care what it does, not how it works.
SpicyAnt 9 points a year ago
Maybe I am being too simplistic here. But I have never received a spam message to my XMPP account and I don't know how a spammer would find it.
In a phone-based system a spammer can spam a list of numbers, or use contact lists that are easily shared via phone permissions. There are several low-effort discovery processes.
For e-mail, you get spam when you you input your personal e-mail into forms, websites, or post it publicly.
But for something like XMPP... It seems rather difficult to discover accounts effectively to spam them. And, if it is an actual problem, why not implement some kind of 'identity swap' that automatically transmits a new identity to approved contacts? A chat username does not need to be as static as an e-mail or a phone number for most people.
I just don't see 'spam' as such a difficult challenge in this context, and not enough in my view to balance out requesting a phone number. Perhaps a spammer can chip-in?
lemmywinksthegerbilking 9 points a year ago
It's private but it's not anonymous. they know who is talking to who, but not what they are talking about.
Jason2357 1 point a year ago
That's not exactly true. See Sealed sender: https://signal.org/blog/sealed-sender/
JoshuaFalken 1 point a year ago
Last time I tried Simplex, the battery drain was unbelievable. Maybe I'll give it another go and see what happens, but I'm not optimistic.
usernameusername 7 points a year ago
Haven't seen anyone link this here so I'll link it myself
https://dessalines.github.io/...
Some things are outdated, like how you had to give others your phone number (although it's still necessary for signup) but most of these still hold up
MangoPenguin 7 points a year ago
I assume ease of use and spam prevention.
I think Signal tries to be at least somewhat attractive to the average person who wants more privacy than just using WhatsApp or whatever. Making it easy to message existing contacts helps a lot with adoption.
j4k3 6 points a year ago
They implemented an alt method IIRC but you must go out of your way to search and find it. I just recall seeing a bunch of post headlines about using email or something like that a year or so back.
They send an initial SMS message that is a main expense and funded by some rich person and donations. I think that has some significance to encryption or something but I'm not sure of the details. I could be wrong on that one, it has been years since I read the details.
solrize 6 points a year ago
Is there a quick explanation of what signal actually does? I don't understand the need for a phone number either. Jami doesn't ask for a phone number. It has other deficiencies that make me not want to use it, but those are technical rather than policy, more or less. Similarly, irc (I'm luddite enough to still be using it) doesn't ask for a phone number either. So this is all suspicious. There are a bunch of other things like this too (Element, Matrix, etc.) that I haven't looked into and tbh I don't understand why they exist.
CosmicTurtle0 4 points a year ago
Signal is a messenger service. You can expire messages after a certain amount of time.
They ask for a phone number to limit bots. I used my Google voice number and it worked fine. I like Telegram which banned me after a day of use for using Google Voice.
solrize -1 points a year ago
I get that Signal is a messaging system (not sure if "messenger service" has a specific meaning). What I don't understand is why I'd want to use it instead of any of the million others that are out there. I've never used Signal and don't have the slightest clue about how it operates, but apparently it tries to mess with the contact list on your phone? That sounds bad. I use Nextcloud Chat sometimes and its web design is ugly, but it works ok and you can self-host it fairly easily. It doesn't do anything with your phone contacts. Jami is distributed but (maybe unrelated) I often have trouble getting it to work at all.
ryannathans 4 points a year ago
It doesn't "mess with your contacts". You can choose to give contacts access if you wish to have secure contact discovery. Contacts are not uploaded.
It's robustly encrypted and quantum secure, without metadata leaks like the sender of a message.
It's recommended by Edward Snowden.
If you want to message someone, have the ability to verify there is no man in the middle attack, have perfect forward secrecy, very strong crypto, use open source software and still have all the conveniences of a modern message app, use signal.
solrize 4 points a year ago
Do you mean the client side is open source? What about the server? If you're required to use Signal's server, how do you know it's not disclosing metadata? If you can self-host it, why the phone number?
devfuuu 2 points a year ago
It's not suspicious. It's been talked about for years. People know exactly what the phone number is used for. Easy discoverability, quick and seamless onboarding of new users by providing a way to bootstrap their social graph, and it being very similar to the process of the other biggest player that people just understand. And spam prevention. The phones are not leaked or used for anything else. The other alternatives exist and you are welcome to onboard the people you want onto them if you think it's simpler.
The code is open, if you don't trust other people and can't read the code to understand then hire someone you trust to validate the claims and assure you. But spreading FUD and saying it's suspicious is not productive to anyone.
solrize 2 points a year ago
I don't understand what you mean about discoverability: is my presence on the network advertised to strangers and spammers? That doesn't sound good. What does the onboarding process look like?
You still haven't said what Signal's advantages are supposed to be over alternatives, though I can guess some (e.g. better/more crypto than irc has). Jami seems conceptually ok, but buggy in implementation. Nextcloud Talk works but is kind of clunky. Matrix is popular though I've never used it: is it the main alternative to Signal these days? I thought it was what all the hipsters had migrated to while luddites like me were still on irc. Jitsi Meet looks nice though again I haven't explored it much. I've been puzzled for a long time that there is so much work in this area yet everything has deficiencies. Are there difficult problems to solve?
If Signal's code is open then of course I'd want to self-host the server. Can I do that? Does that get in the way of the onboarding process you mention? Where does the phone number come in, in that case? If I to use Signal's server, that doesn't sound so open, and normally there's no way for me to verify that it's running the same code that they claim.
I don't see where I'm spreading FUD. Ignoring a question and calling it FUD doesn't invalidate the question.
solrize 2 points a year ago
Thanks. The more I think about it, the more this seems like outright evil behaviour on Signal's part to pursue user growth, similar to Facebook etc. Imagine that you and your boss are in each other's contacts for obvious work-related reasons. Do you really want Signal notifying your boss that you registered for Signal? For some of us it's fine, but in general it seems like a terrible idea.
solrize 1 point a year ago
Very interesting, thanks. Do you mean they use SGX (Intel's buggy secure enclave feature)? Any idea what they use it for? If not SGX, do you know what the issue is? AMD Epyc processors have something similar but different, fwiw. If there is such highly secret info on the server though, that makes self-hosting even more important. It also makes the architecture suspect.
rirus 2 points a year ago
- You can easily migrate everyone from WhatsApp to Signal and they don't have to exchange usernames as most people have the phonenumbers in their contacts. (This has massive drawbacks addressed somewhere else, one lesser known fact is that they would have to verify fingerprints anyway to be sure they are speaking to the right person an not a proxy. Instead of that they could also exchange username+fingerprint initially, like Simplex does it.)
FreeWilliam 6 points a year ago
Jami.net
Ignore the comment saying signal is "end to end encrypted" "private" etc They are simply stuck in a delusional state where they try to convince themselves that signal is the best option so they can continue using it. Nothing is private if it isn't fully libre because you never know what the proprietary code is doing. The signal protocol itself has its source code released, and the encryption and security code is publicly available, but the signal Foundation has stated that it uses both free code and proprietary code. Their reason is UI, but it's hard to make sure whatever proprietary code is being used for because you simply can't see it. As GNU puts it: "You're walking in a pitch black cave". Jami is fully libre and is a GNU project. You don't even need any phone number!
MajesticElevator 2 points a year ago
You can easily verify the keys of the person you’re speaking with, and they’re generated locally… so technically speaking, even if their servers are leaking, your messages are still unreadable, but yea that’s not ideal
autonomoususer -1 points a year ago
Not when it's backdoored. So, tell the guy above there's a fully libre copy.
MajesticElevator 0 points a year ago
? Even if the servers are backdoored, your messages are still encrypted by your key - as long as the server didn’t manipulate the keys at the first exchange, which you can check by verifying the security code
If it matches, then it’s okay. Such features exist in all encrypted messenger apps
autonomoususer 1 point a year ago
The app, not the server.
FreeWilliam 3 points a year ago
And we should report problems and fix them ourselves to make it better
autonomoususer 1 point a year ago
Based
solrize 1 point a year ago
Yeah I'm on their Discourse forum, but the situation isn't that great, and it's unclear to me if the problems are fixable. Particularly when there are incompatibilities between version X and version Y, where both versions are already in the wild. You can't travel backwards in time to fix those versions, and this (like email clients or telephones) is an application area where you can't tell people to update their clients all the time. You have to keep things interoperable.
It's also often inconvenient to reproduce bugs like that in order to diagnose them. If you try to talk to someone over Jami and it doesn't work, you generally can't borrow their phone to analyze the issue. If you're one of the core developers, maybe you have access to a room full of different kinds of phones and OS versions to test with, but a typical user/contributor won't have anything like that.
FreeWilliam 2 points a year ago
Yeah, this is just the reality of unpaid free software developers, they don't have the recourses to work on every single bug as quick as a paid developer, but that doesn't justify not reporting bugs and working with the developers to fix them. Like you said, Jami is grest ethically so why not make it great function? Also, don't you have a computer and a phone? Test on those. I don't own a phone, so I can't test the phone, but I do gladly test on my laptop.
FreeWilliam 3 points a year ago
Great, but it relies on signal's servers, so it's centralised. Also, Moly merely removes proprietary parts from Signal, but that’s a workaround (same thing for linux-libre kernel, it's free software, but just a workaround which is why I'm looking to help with HyprbolaBSD). I'm not coming here to say Molly isn't an improvement, but being centralised and relying on a non-tully-free program's servers is a huge red flag for me :)
coconut 0 points a year ago
It doesn't matter whether a server claims to run free software or not. You can't verify what it's running. That's why E2EE is designed entirely around the client. You can't trust the server no matter what.
autonomoususer 0 points a year ago
Did anyone say that was the problem? It will not matter how encrypted your messages are when the centralised service gets easily banned.
rottingleaf 1 point a year ago
You should have visited Signal's github page first, I dunno. Before talking. Made up a lot of stuff.
They do have proprietary code for that crypto wallet they have there, well hidden, and for, eh, phone number registration, but other than that module it's all released, I think.
The server and the client applications are FOSS. You can host it for yourself, patching out the domain names and registration parts the way you like it more.
rottingleaf 2 points a year ago
I think choosing a server, like in some ICQ clients, is not a complex modification.
rirus 2 points a year ago
They had it implemented but discarded it out of stupid centralization ideology. Moxie said it on a Chaos communication Congress presentation he held but which he didn't wanted to be recorded, as the stuff he said was stupid and wrong.
autonomoususer 1 point a year ago
This is why escaping WhatsApp and Discord, anti-libre software, is most important part.
FreeWilliam 2 points a year ago
That’s not the full picture. That's exactly the problem I was highlighting. The issue isn't whether some of the code is "FOSS", it’s about whether all of it is. If even small parts remain proprietary (as you mentioned), then we can’t verify what those parts are doing. And those parts could theoretically significantly affect the data collection. Also, I didn't make up a lot of stuff. The Signal Foundation themselves have confirmed that certain UI and build components are not fully libre. As the GNU project puts it, if part of your system is closed, then you're trusting a black box, no matter how well-lit the rest of it is.
rottingleaf 0 points a year ago
Signal protocol guarantees that what's on the server we can discard in your suspicions, it doesn't matter, because you are not trusting it.
The client is fully open.
FreeWilliam 2 points a year ago
If it's not fully free, I don't trust it. I don't understand how someone in a privacy community doesn't understand how much a few lines of code can track someone so easily no matter how much of the program is free software.
quickenparalysespunk 6 points a year ago
thousands of threads on this topic since decades ago.
it's an eternal debate (since signal has no plans to change)
just read the history and join the rest of us waiting for them to change. using signal before that change is completely optional. go ahead and don't use it. no problem.
opening the discussion again is just tiring.
solrize 3 points a year ago
read the history
Is there a url for the history? Or for a good answer about the phone numbers? If the topic keeps recurring and the answers don't satisfy people, that suggests that there is no good answer, and that there are possibly misaligned interests between Signal and its users.
quickenparalysespunk 0 points a year ago
don't be like one of the now!now!now! types (i.e. OP) and treat every new discovery (personal first encounters with existing tech, situations) as the final nail in the coffin. there are other messengers available while waiting for signal to change.
just saying, acknowledge that many others have arrived at the same problem years before you and they are not your enemy. so yelling at the choir is counter productive.
0101100101 -2 points a year ago
opening the discussion again is just tiring.
so tiring that i opened it and read it, then typed a long response.
qwerty 5 points a year ago
To prevent spam and to allow people who already know each other's number to easily contact over signal. If you want an anonymous account use an online sms activation service paid with monero, personally I recommend smspool.net .
Maverick604 4 points a year ago
Session is an alternative that does not require, or request, your phone number (or any other identifying information). Honestly, I have no idea why Signal got popular and Sessions did not. As soon as Signal asked for my phone number that set off alarm bells for me and I’ve never really trusted it since.
throwawayacc0430 14 points a year ago path: 0 16994357 16996075, hotness: undefined, score: 14, children: 4
MoonlightFox 9 points a year ago
This is incredibly important. Signal is considered the "gold standard" of encrypted and private communication for a reason.
Maverick604 -1 points a year ago
Thanks for this link but your username also makes this pretty sus. 😜
throwawayacc0430 1 point a year ago path: 0 16994357 16996075 16999419 17005424, hotness: undefined, score: 1, children: 1
Maverick604 1 point a year ago
Ya. It was a joke.
Maverick604 1 point a year ago
I don’t know that their security is “broken”. It may be, I don’t know. But also without anything that connects you to any particular message, it seems that – in itself – is a pretty good form of security.
I just don’t get why people accept Signal’s justification for requiring a phone number. They absolutely don’t need to (session proves that). It is certainly possible for them to say, “If you register without a phone number and access to your phone book then you will lose automatic discoverability by other users of Signal — meaning that you need to find another (physical) way to exchange your Signal username with your contacts”. They CAN do this. I think many users, like myself, would be fine with this tradeoff for greater anonymity. For some reason, they have steadfastly refused. The reasoning behind this refusal is what bothers me.
Maverick604 1 point a year ago
Yes. That was how they avoided using identifying information from their users.
autonomoususer 4 points a year ago
When anyone get a copy of your data, nothing will bring it back.
0101100101 -6 points a year ago
I'm sure that just sets the database column hide_phonenumber to TRUE.
nucleative 4 points a year ago
Is it possible to use a voip based SMS for registration?
Those are a little easier to get anonymously then physical sim cards.
autonomoususer 0 points a year ago
Too many steps.
Despite this, escaping WhatsApp and Discord, anti-libre software, is more important.
SolarPunker 3 points a year ago
Because it's centralized, I prefer SimpleX.
Undertaker 3 points a year ago
What an answers. Completely nonsense
0101100101 -3 points a year ago
perfect for the everyday user
...because of course, they don't need privacy, do they now. "Nothing to hide" and all that jazz.
JakobFel 2 points a year ago
Privacy is not necessarily anonymity. Signal uses a phone number to prevent spam and DDOS attacks on their network. Session doesn't do this and got wrecked by DDOS attacks to the point where most of the major groups are pretty much dead.
Use Signal to talk to people you know. That's what it's for. You don't use it for anonymous chats.
M154nthr0p3 1 point a year ago
I think you can use a pay phone to sign up.
RockLobstore 1 point a year ago
Tried session? Anyone have comments on it? Nice to be able to skip the phone and easily use vpn, though I haven’t spent enough time on that.
e8d79 4 points a year ago
Session is a Signal fork and they removed forward secrecy which makes them vulnerable to Key Compromise Impersonation attacks.
Desyn0xox 2 points a year ago
I think the people behind Session cares for their mission, and it might align with OP's, so maybe. Although I personally am not too fond of about all their choices.
The omission of Forward Secrecy for instance doesn't sit well with me. Each to their own though, and they do go into their reasoning on their blog: https://getsession.org/session-protocol-explained
Likewise their last audit from 2021, lists quite a handful of critical/moderate issues in their apps, hopefully they've fixet it. Afterall it's been a while since 2021. https://getsession.org/faq#security-audit
bigbrother 1 point a year ago
Privacy: they know who you are but they don't know what are you doing/when are you doing. Anonymity: they don't know who you are.
onlinepersona 0 points a year ago
There is a lot of FUD here. It's just like anti-vaxxers claiming vaccines make you autistic or have microchips in them: they don't understand what they're talking about, have different threat models, and are paranoid.
Messages are private on signal and they cannot be connected to you through sealed sender. There have been multiple audits and even government requests for information which have returned only the phone number and last connection time.
cypherpunks 19 points a year ago
Messages are private on signal and they cannot be connected to you through sealed sender.
No. Signal's sealed sender has an incoherent threat model and only protects against an honest server, and if the server is assumed to be honest then a "no logs" policy would be sufficient.
Sealed sender is complete security theater. And, just in case it is ever actually difficult for the server to infer who is who (eg, if there are many users behind the same NAT), the server can also simply turn it off and the client will silently fall back to "unsealed sender". 🤡
The fact that they go to this much dishonest effort to convince people that they "can't" exploit their massive centralized trove of activists' metadata is a pretty strong indicator of one answer to OP's question.
Skankhunt420 1 point 3 months ago
What would you recommend as an alternative to Signal?
ProdigalFrog 1 point 3 months ago
Not OP, but XMPP and Delta chat are good options.
For XMPP, the Movim client in particular is a good replacement for Discord, since it can do audio/video calls, as well as screenshare, and Discord-like spaces (channels with groups of rooms).
autonomoususer -2 points a year ago
So, they do not need our phone numbers but they still demand it.
Despite this, escaping WhatsApp and Discord, anti-libre software, is more important.
throwawayacc0430 -3 points a year ago path: 0 16993174, hotness: undefined, score: -3, children: 12
ReluctantZen 2 points a year ago
They don't need Signal to do any of this though, so this doesn't seem like a very plausible theory.
throwawayacc0430 2 points a year ago path: 0 16993174 16994470 16994577, hotness: undefined, score: 2, children: 2
guy 2 points a year ago
Why can't they send Pegasus to everyone?
If they can create a fund and invent Signal, they can just make Pegasus part of AOSP and have every manufacturer be forced to install it silently
throwawayacc0430 3 points a year ago path: 0 16993174 16994470 16994577 16994651 16994734, hotness: undefined, score: 3, children: 0
autonomoususer 1 point a year ago
What are you doing to help others escape WhatsApp, anti-libre software?
throwawayacc0430 3 points a year ago path: 0 16993174 16994778 16994897, hotness: undefined, score: 3, children: 3
merde 6 points a year ago
Obviously Signal is the lesser evil, but don't use Signal if you are planning a revolt is what I'm saying.
or if you're the US' secretary of defense and you're going to bomb Houthis
🤷
throwawayacc0430 5 points a year ago path: 0 16993174 16994778 16994897 16997245 16997316, hotness: undefined, score: 5, children: 0
autonomoususer 2 points a year ago
Put that at the start. This is c/privacy, not c/revolt.
0101100101 -1 points a year ago
This is what the UK police do with WhatsApp data. Even though they can't read the messages, they do use the connections of messages to suspicious characters as evidence including date and times, which also puts these other people in the spotlight, opening further investigations.
The UK police can also use 'stinger' devices that are "fake" mobile data towers to intercept mobile communications.
Majestic -5 points a year ago
Because their founder (Marlinspike) is probably under a National Security Letter, maybe it's just that, maybe he's done some crimes they're also holding over him. If you look at his behavior it's that of someone very paranoid that they're going to be found out to be cooperating with the feds and get hit with charges for not upholding the bargain, someone straddling one or two big lies that have to be maintained to keep their life going. Very controlling of things they should be open about if they care about privacy as they claim. But exactly the behavior of someone under an NSL who's terrified of getting hit with charges for that and maybe other things but who is expected to front and run a purported privacy first messenger. The secrecy, the refusal to allow others to operate their own servers, the antagonism towards federation, the long periods without publishing source code updates.
This doesn't necessarily mean that signal message content is compromised, the NSA primarily scrapes metadata and would most care about knowing who is talking to who and to put real names to those people and building graphs of networks of people. Other things like what times they talk can be inferred from upstream taps on signals servers without their knowledge or cooperation via traffic observation and correlation especially when paired with the fourteen eyes global intercept network. With a phone number it's also a lot easier to pinpoint an exact device to hack using a cooperating (or hacked) telecom. Phone numbers can also be correlated to triangulated positions of devices, see who in a leftist protest network was A) heavily sending messages and B) attended that protest and left last and begin to infer things about structure and particular relationships.
And those saying it has to do with spam prevention, that's kind of nonsense. First I still get the occasional spam, second a phone number that can receive a confirmation text is something all these criminal organizations have access to which the average person doesn't. Third it's possible to prevent spam just by looking for people (especially new accounts under 120 days old) sending very small amounts of messages (1-3) to a very large amount of other users especially in a short amount of time. Third there's no reason to keep the phone number tied to the account, a confirmation text could be required with a promise to delete the phone number immediately after (would still be technically useful to the NSA though less useful for keeping track of people changing numbers or using a burner for this who might be higher value targets).
solrize 6 points a year ago
That is a pretty weird post that doesn't make much sense, but I remember meeting Moxie and asking him about Android security and being surprised at how defensive he was about it. Is Signal the app he was working on? That helps somewhat. I get them confused with each other.
The Signal app doesn't appear to be on F-droid, which is a bit discomforting.
GrumpyDuckling 4 points a year ago
I got one one time, been using it for years. Fuckin' weird to try on people who are privacy and security conscious. My guess is that they were attempting to see what numbers are using signal in the first place if someone responds with a "fuck off" then the spammer knows they use signal.
ryannathans 1 point a year ago
Secret sender invalidates your metadata argument
sit -12 points a year ago
Do not trust signal. Mosk advertised it on twitter.
Edit: I only got 11 downvotes yet, so i have to add:
Signal is not allowed in Russia, guess why. Telegram is. yes yes try harder. THINK mf
WhatsApp is obviously not recommended.
I’m not saying don’t use. I’m saying do not trust.
MajesticElevator 7 points a year ago
And then went back on it to advertise telegram lmao
Btw don’t use computers, Musk use them
autonomoususer 0 points a year ago
Where does its software license stop us controlling it?
privacy
@lemmy.ml
49245
4905
6038
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don't promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
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privacy
@lemmy.ml
49245
4905
6038
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don't promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
go to feed...
Because they're building a private, not anonymous, instant messenger. They've been very open about this.
save