Sure, most won't right. But clearly in this thread some people are willing to do that and I'm not convinced that there is a large burden/cost to signal to allow

Sure, most won't right. But clearly in this thread some people are willing to do that and I'm not convinced that there is a large burden/cost to signal to allow this. The problem for me is that my contact list of Signal users is quite small (1 or 2 people) and everyone else isn't using it. I don't see the reason to allow Signal access to that list of people "Just in case" they decide to. It's incredibly unlikely bordering on near impossible. This isn't the golden bullet of reasons that it should be this way, but the fact that in design Signal has made the choice to force access to contacts to me, says one of two things. 1. We haven't thought about cases outside of our own experience and expressly reject those as being outside of the market we're interested in. "You're not the user we're looking for." 2. There is value/commoditisation in that contact list that signal is interested in and this is the price to play in their system. The problem is that either of these two options run pretty counter to the idea of secure privacy focused messaging client designed to be seperate from the user. People's value of privacy is nuanced enough that making broad scoped decisions like this can run afoul of their expectations. Considering that Signal is aiming itself at the privacy conscious (Over-conscious in a lot of instances I'm sure), it's very weird that they would forgo this obvious affordance of information.