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Signal without phone numbers built on blockchain technology and with its own crypto currency? I think I'll stick to Signal.
by hnarn 7y ago
Signal without phone numbers built on blockchain technology and with its own crypto currency? I think I'll stick to Signal.
- tjoff 7y agoIf I have to provide my phone number I'll stick with SMS.
- jasondclinton 7y agoSignal is actively working on removing the phone number requirement. It's a hard identity problem.
- orisho 7y agoI don't get how it's a hard problem. For many years we got by without using phone numbers as identifiers to communicate online. Why not usernames? Or any other one of the myriad of phone number alternatives
- afuchs 7y agoSignal's developers don't want to store contact lists on their servers because of their concerns about privacy. They also worry about ease of use for non-technical users. Their solution is to use the end user's address book as a contact list with users' phone numbers acting as identifiers. The identifiers are mapped to endpoints with some method that is supposed to protect the end user's privacy. The app could encrypt a list of usernames and store it on a server, but that would affect usability for non-technical users.
- orisho 7y agoIt could store usernames locally on the phone and use the same method to psedonymize them. It seems to me that Signal devs just have a strong preference for the convenience of using phone numbers. That's okay, but does not make the change hard to make.
- balladeer 7y agoThey already have the solution and you’ve mentioned it.
- oneplane 7y agoBecause you downgrade identity that way. With phone numbers you know it has to be connected to physical device and most of the times a person. With generic usernames you have nothing. This practically means you have to do some sort identity verification in meatspace beforehand.
- grawprog 7y ago>With phone numbers you know it has to be connected to physical device and most of the times a person. That's not true. TextNow, and i'm sure others, will just give you a phone number through their app from whatever location you want that you can change nearly at any time. You can use it from a web browser, it doesn't need to be tied to a phone or anything else. I've personally used it responding to ads and things I'd rather not give my actual number for and a friend of mine used it on a phone for a year or so as their personal phone number when they couldn't afford to pay for regular phone service. That friend actually used one of those numbers to authenticate some other messaging service.
- oneplane 7y agoJust because it's attached to TextNow doesn't mean it's not attached anywhere. But yes, things like number-as-ID or email based identity is flawed and has been manipulated and abused plenty of times. I'm not saying identity is a must or that it's either good or bad, I'm saying that that is what the market is like right now and removing it causes people to see it as a downgrade. Also, depending on your jurisdiction it might be illegal to provide a number that isn't yours (varying from spam laws to identity theft), just as it might violate the EULA and suspend service from whoever wanted that number in the first place. Generally, if you want to circumvent doxing yourself there are plenty of methods, but we're talking about mass-market here. The rest uses Jabber with OTR or some form of the signal protocol or maybe plain PGP/GPG crypto. But if we go down the rabbit hole of niches we would have a completely different context to work from.
- grawprog 7y ago>I'm saying that that is what the market is like right now and removing it causes people to see it as a downgrade. The market's only like that because there's a lack of alternatives. 'The market' isn't an abstract entity that came into existence out of nowhere. Companies make the choice to provide only that option, people never chose this. Removing the ability to chat with people using a username and password is the downgrade, that existed long before SMS and phone verification and tying those services to what is essentially an epehemeral number not ever actually owned by you, but the company that provides it. There's plenty of places in the world where having a consistent phone number isn't really the norm. I've got friends i've saved multiple phone numbers for because they signed up to this or that messenger with different phone numbers. Phone numbers are useless as an identification method. I pointed this out in another comment, but because whatsapp and signal use this system, there are random people in my contacts list, whose profile pictures and status updates I can see, but I have no idea who they are because the people that used to have those phone numbers no longer have them and they were reassigned to someone else.
- squarefoot 7y agoThat would be a huge step forward, and would make me seriously reconsider Signal. I know this would create the identification problem in contexts where one actually wants to give proof of his/hers identity by pairing the client to a personal piece of hardware, but I believe/hope there are better ways to accomplish this without tying the account to a phone number (==cellphone). Also, old netbooks can be purchased literally for the cost of a pizza at flea markets, and they're much much better platforms for building secure communications terminals; a lot more reliable and trustworthy than cellphones and tablets with their closed operating systems.
- 2J0 7y agoSkype uses Signal protocol and allows call records deletion. AFAICR a email address registration will suffice instead of a phone number
- geofft 7y agoThis is like not wearing your seatbelt so you can escape faster if you're in a crash.
- cies 7y agoIt's more like if any new car has your full name, address and phone number clearly written on every side, that you prefer to keep driving your current car which does not have those "features".
- tjoff 7y agoNo. It is not giving my phone number to an entity I don't trust. I don't trust anyone/thing that asks for my phone number without a valid reason. Signal does not have a valid reason. And in the context of privacy that makes signal borderline fraudulent. Even further, signal uniquely gives facebook and linkedin et al. my contact graph. Why? Because it relies on the contact list. Chances that anyone I'm talking to over signal also has facebook/linkedin/... is rather great. Even facebook is better in this regard since you don't have to have a phone number to create a facebook account.
- tjoff 7y agoI regret using fraudulent. I admit signal has things going for it. But the use of phone numbers makes it utterly irrelevant in my eyes. Doesn't matter if it's the best thing ever, I could not possible care less about it. Which is a shame because I want to.
- m-p-3 7y ago> Signal does not have a valid reason. It makes it easier to discover from your contacts who already uses Signal by having the phone number tied to a Signal account. I'd prefer if using a phone number with Signal was optional.
- tjoff 7y agoThat is a valid reason for having it as an option. Not to force it.
- 2J0 7y agoSMS leaks gps and tower triangulation data
- deepersprout 7y agoSignal depends on play services on android. I keep reading here that signal is secure and we should all switch to that, but I just can't get over the fact that it works only if you effectively give root to google on your phone. I can not take Signal seriously when it tells me it is secure, but has that requirement.
- kupfer 7y agoThey offer an app version on their website that does not depend on play services¹. I've been using it on a "google free" lineageos for quite a while (years?) and it works very well. [1] https://signal.org/android/apk/ https://signal.org/android/apk/
- ewired 7y agoMy device runs Android without Google Play Services. Signal has often presented a feature to use its own HTTP WebSocket notification services after I freshly upgrade my phone by re-installing an upgraded ROM. It's not specific to any release of Signal, it just happens when it doesn't detect Google Play Services. There is a process to correct this and make it use microG which is much easier on battery life. microG still connects to Google's notification services, but there is no Google malware on the device. From what I can tell, Signal only uses Google's services to "wake up" the connection to Signal to check for new messages.
- balladeer 7y agoI might give Android another try seeing iPhones have also started growing faster than my palm. But I don’t see any sanely sized phones for which there’s a zero friction google-free Android migration available with at least 3-4 years of support.
- johnisgood 7y agoYeah, or Telegram. Telegram is not even end-to-end encrypted by default, you need to open a secret chat, which of course is not supported on PC! Wire is lame, too, it stopped supporting older Android versions, so I cannot use it on my ~3 years old phone. I will no longer be vouching for them, they have done nothing but make it worse through many different ways.
- mirimir 7y agoIt's not a cryotocurrency. It's a private blockchain. As I understand it, it incentivises nodes to play nice. Signal's requirement for phone numbers is an absolute red flag for me. And using contact lists seems insane. I've been playing with it a little, using the Linux app, and it was extremely intuitive. But then, I only chat with people who I know online via other channels. With zero meatspace involvement. So if I care, I can cross authenticate. Using GnuPG even. I'm 0525c5ba8a4bc6fc6f107b637b5107b6b7abfd1153ea042b5e9fe474acb5d9cf35 if y'all would like to chat.