Agreed. It also alerts you with "X is on Signal, say hey!" notifications when someone in your contacts signs up. I've brought this up before on HN and the Signa

Agreed. It also alerts you with "X is on Signal, say hey!" notifications when someone in your contacts signs up. I've brought this up before on HN and the Signal issue tracker [0] but there's been little to no attention paid to it. They also seem to conflate simply using an encrypted messenger with alerting everyone else that you're using an encrypted messenger. It's the difference between an email client that lets you send a GPG encrypted message and a client that immediately notifies you of every contact with a GPG public key, regardless of whether you've been in contact with them. I understand it can be done, I just don't think it should be implemented in the official client everyone uses. It's pretty shitty because apart from this issue, it's the best in it's class of secure mobile messenger. Unfortunately it has friends (and perhaps myself) eager for new entrants for which this isn't an issue. I use Ricochet (uses Tor hidden services) on Desktop, which doesn't require a phone number or registration, and is metadata-safe, but the limited feature set leaves a bit to be desired. [0]: https://github.com/WhisperSystems/Signal-Android/issues/5009 https://github.com/WhisperSystems/Signal-Android/issues/5009