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Signal using phone numbers is almost as anti-anonymous as you can possibly get. A phone number leaks nearly everything about you to anyone who has access to the

Signal using phone numbers is almost as anti-anonymous as you can possibly get. A phone number leaks nearly everything about you to anyone who has access to the right data sources. Most people would be more anonymous providing a SSN than a phone number in practice.

tptacek 8y ago
You just said the same thing LVH did, just with more emphasis. It's tough to reason about on a message board. Signal does some important privacy things better than anyone else does; for instance, Signal cares more about metadata that I think any mainstream messenger does. On the other hand, Signal made a conscious, deliberate choice to ensure that it works for ordinary users. It is not a goal of Signal's to mollify the tiny fraction of people in the world who have strong opinions about Tor; it is much more important to them that, say, any immigration lawyer in the country could readily pick it up and start using it. The phone number ID thing creates an instantly bootstrapped social network. It solves a problem Signal actually cares about, while making a problem nerds care about a little more annoying. That is a reasonable reason not to use Signal (if you're one of those nerds), but, like DeVault's inane F-Droid conspiracy theory, not a reasonable reason to warn people off of Signal. Signal, WhatsApp, Wire: any one of those is going to be radically better than the alternatives nonspecialists are likely to use (Fb Messenger, email). But my confidence drops rapidly when you go to anything else on this list.
- lawnchair_larry 8y ago
  You are way out of touch here. Disclosing a phone number is absolutely not a nerd problem and very much a normal people problem. Particularly women or vulnerable people. I don’t even need to warn people about it, they already don’t want to share their phone number with strangers. That’s in spite of them not even knowing a fraction of what a dangerous person can do with your phone number. Journalists and nerds know how to get burner numbers. They have less to worry about. I know people who have been sim-jacked to bypass their 2FA and steal their savings, which they did not get back. I know people who have been stalked using cell tower geolocation. I know (of) people who have hacked LexisNexus accounts and can get your whole life with a phone number. Hell, I know which forums I could spend $20 on to get that info. Aside from the really dangerous stuff, many people don’t want harassing texts or calls from creepy nerds, so they have reservations about sharing their phone number (and rightly so). The set of people I want to casually message is far larger than the set of people who I want to have my number, and I’m not even particularly worried about these things.
  - tptacek 8y ago
    The goal is to make messaging secure for everybody who is messaging now. The most popular messaging application in the world already uses phone numbers as identifiers. I understand what a phone number is and why people find them sensitive, but I'm not the person who's out of touch in this debate.

tptacek 8y ago

You just said the same thing LVH did, just with more emphasis. It's tough to reason about on a message board. Signal does some important privacy things better than anyone else does; for instance, Signal cares more about metadata that I think any mainstream messenger does. On the other hand, Signal made a conscious, deliberate choice to ensure that it works for ordinary users. It is not a goal of Signal's to mollify the tiny fraction of people in the world who have strong opinions about Tor; it is much more important to them that, say, any immigration lawyer in the country could readily pick it up and start using it. The phone number ID thing creates an instantly bootstrapped social network. It solves a problem Signal actually cares about, while making a problem nerds care about a little more annoying. That is a reasonable reason not to use Signal (if you're one of those nerds), but, like DeVault's inane F-Droid conspiracy theory, not a reasonable reason to warn people off of Signal. Signal, WhatsApp, Wire: any one of those is going to be radically better than the alternatives nonspecialists are likely to use (Fb Messenger, email). But my confidence drops rapidly when you go to anything else on this list.

lawnchair_larry 8y ago
You are way out of touch here. Disclosing a phone number is absolutely not a nerd problem and very much a normal people problem. Particularly women or vulnerable people. I don’t even need to warn people about it, they already don’t want to share their phone number with strangers. That’s in spite of them not even knowing a fraction of what a dangerous person can do with your phone number. Journalists and nerds know how to get burner numbers. They have less to worry about. I know people who have been sim-jacked to bypass their 2FA and steal their savings, which they did not get back. I know people who have been stalked using cell tower geolocation. I know (of) people who have hacked LexisNexus accounts and can get your whole life with a phone number. Hell, I know which forums I could spend $20 on to get that info. Aside from the really dangerous stuff, many people don’t want harassing texts or calls from creepy nerds, so they have reservations about sharing their phone number (and rightly so). The set of people I want to casually message is far larger than the set of people who I want to have my number, and I’m not even particularly worried about these things.
- tptacek 8y ago
  The goal is to make messaging secure for everybody who is messaging now. The most popular messaging application in the world already uses phone numbers as identifiers. I understand what a phone number is and why people find them sensitive, but I'm not the person who's out of touch in this debate.