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If I understand correctly it’ll still not be possible to create an account without entering a phone number? For me this is a requirement to call a service a pr
by zuhsetaqi 3y ago
If I understand correctly it’ll still not be possible to create an account without entering a phone number?
For me this is a requirement to call a service a private service because in Germany at least every phone number is connected with a persons identity. To get a phone number you need to connect it to an identity using a identity card
- outime 3y agoSame in Spain since 2004 Madrid train bombings IIRC.
- int_19h 3y agoThis is the case in most countries these days. There are very few places left where you can get a mobile phone number without identifying yourself at some point.
- Gigachad 3y agoI used to care, but at this point it’s obvious that taking a phone number is by far the most effective anti spam and anti trolling method in existence.
- someplaceguy 3y agoWhich is great when databases leak. Absolutely brilliant.
- Springtime 3y agoThere was a forum that used to have as a requirement a non-free email account and seemed to have no issues with spam accounts with tens of thousands of members for more than 10 years. In that use case it seemed the non-free account aspect to sign-up was the threshold which seemed to keep spammers out vs the fact such an email account could be (with relevant authority) traced back to a real identity. I'd be curious if there is a study that has looked into the thresholds for different use cases at which spam account creation drops to negligible amounts and how much price vs anonymity vs difficulty factors into it.
- outime 3y agoNot in Finland for example.
- thisislife2 3y agoYes, this is just Apple level bullshit - trust us with your private data even though no law prevents us from exploiting it ...
- stavros 3y agoDamn, people will never be satisfied, will they. It's not meant to be an anonymous messenger, because those have spam issues.
- tentacleuno 3y agoSignal has spam issues even with the phone number requirement, as I've experienced lately (though nothing on the scale of Twitter). I dread to think what the spam would be like without the requirement of a phone number.
- Stephen304 3y agoAt least now you can solve the existing spam problem if you want by disallowing people from using your number to message you in the privacy settings and randomizing your username after anyone new adds you - that way your username is like a one time password to add you, kind of like what lots of people here wish existed for phone calls.
- fsflover 3y agoI never received any spam in Matrix.
- nottorp 3y ago... but then Signal wouldn't have your phone number either. What they need it for is ... dubious if you ask me.
- tivert 3y ago> ... but then Signal wouldn't have your phone number either. What they need it for is ... dubious if you ask me. The reasons they need it aren't really that dubious to me: they want to create a service that actual people will actually use, not just weird privacy geeks who never gave up on PGP. Using phone numbers allows for the kind of user discovery that most people expect in 2024, and requiring them inserts a barrier to mass account creation that can keep spam accounts down to a manageable level (especially given the whole point is they can't do content-based spam-filtering in the way that makes email managable). Personally, my understanding is they've always been trying to develop the maximally private usable chat app, which requires some compromises from the theoretically maximally private chat app.
- nottorp 3y agoBut then it's not private. It's linked to your phone number.
- WithinReason 3y agoYou can now hide you phone number, according to the blog post. [...] Selecting “Nobody” means that if someone enters your phone number on Signal, they will not be able to message or call you, or even see that you’re on Signal. And anyone you’re chatting with on Signal will not see your phone number as part of your Profile Details page – this is true even if your number is saved in their phone’s contacts. Keep in mind that selecting “Nobody” can make it harder for people to find you on Signal.
- nottorp 3y agoI can only hide my phone number from other people, and even for that it should have been hidden by default from the start. Can't hide it from some thought police which may or may not need a court order.
- vld_chk 3y agoThis is a fundamentally different problem for a fundamentally different audience. If we take privacy issue, it can be divided into 3 segments: * Privacy of user data. The basic level. When you use Google or Apple, they collect data. Even if you minimize all settings — data is still collected. This data is used to train models and models is used to sell ads, target you or do anything else you have no clue about (like reselling it to hundred of “partners”). * Privacy against undesired identification. Next layer of privacy. When you want to have some personal life online without sharing much about you. Like Reddit, anonymous forums, or Telegram (to some degree). * Privacy against governments. The ultimate boss of privacy. When you want to hide from all governments in the world your identity. Signal was perfect at first layer strong but not perfect at 3rd layer (e2e encryption, no data collection to share nothing with governments who seek for data, good privacy settings, always tell you if your peer logged to new device to protect from cases when government operates with telecom companies and use sms password to make a new login), and almost non present at 2nd because they have no public features except group chats where you share your number. Now they in one move close gaps at 2nd layer — you can hide phone number and stay fully anonymous, and strength their positions in 3rd layer, leaving the last piece open: government still will know that you have some Signal account. As for me, this setup solves 99,999% cases for regular people in democratic and semi-democratic countries and address the most fundamental one: privacy of data and actions online. Yes it is not perfect but barrier for government to spy on me is that high that I reasonably can believe that in most cases you should never be worried about being spied, especially if you live in some places which are named not as Iran or Russia. The only scenario, in my perspective, you can want to have a login without phone (with all sacrifices to spam accounts, quality of peers and usual troll fiesta in such places) is when you want to do something you don’t want ever be found in your current country. But in this case, IMO, Signal is the last worry you usually have on your mind and there are a lot of specialized services and protocols to address your need.
- autoexec 3y ago> no data collection to share nothing with governments who seek for data, That isn't true anymore and hasn't been for years. Signal collects your data and keeps it forever in the cloud.
- godelski 3y agoI think it is a holdover from the Text Secure days. And like others say, it's a different problem. But for solutions, can't you just buy a voip number? You just need it for registration and then can dump it. I'm sure you can buy one with cash or zcash if you're really paranoid. While in the US I don't have to show my gov ID to get a phone number, I don't know anyone who buys a phone with cash except international students. So practically everyone is identifiable anyways. But I'm not sure this is a deal breaker since all I'm leaking is that I have registered a Signal account. AFAIK Signal only has logs of an account existing and last online with 24hr resolution (which avoids many collision deanonymization methods). Even paying with cash is hard as I'm probably caught on camera (but these usually get flushed). So I'm legitimately curious, why is this a dealbreaker? It doesn't seem like a concern for the vast majority of people, and the problem Signal is solving is secure communication for the masses, not the most secure method possible with unbounded complexity. It's being as secure as possible while being similar in complexity to the average messenger.
- freddie_mercury 3y ago> But for solutions, can't you just buy a voip number? No, how would my uncle in the countryside of Vietnam do that? He doesn't have a credit card -- not many here do. He doesn't speak English -- can you find a website that sells voip numbers in Vietnamese? Buying a voip number from a provider in Vietnam has the same exact KYC requirements as buying a SIM, so it is still tied to your government ID and registered forever. Also buying a VOIP for 1 month costs something like $10 from a quick Google. Average salaries are like $1.50/hour. Nobody is going to pay an entire day's salary to buy an VOIP number they throw for a month just so they can register anonymously for chat. So, not you can't "just" buy a voip number unless you're a rich Westerner. But who needs privacy more? People in liberal democracies or people in places like Vietnam (literally an authoritarian country where people are routinely imprisoned for speaking against the government)? > I don't know anyone who buys a phone with cash except international students. Everyone buys a phone with cash here because few people have credit cards, since there is no such thing as "credit ratings" and it is easy for people to disappear from their debts. There are more people in Vietnam than any country in Europe. We all use smartphones and messenger apps here, too.
- wraptile 3y agoHere in Thailand it's the same but phone numbers get recycled and expire very aggressively. I just got a new phone number and I can login to many platforms of some 20 year old guy who really likes pc gaming. Phone numbers should have NEVER became an ID. Incredibly hypocritical of Signal to claim "privacy focus" when the lowest layer of the system is literally the least secure identification method we have.
- 123yawaworht456 3y agosame in my country. I had two SIM cards dedicated to online crap - one for important stuff like banking, another for social media and such. both have expired after ≈ 3 months of inactivity, when my 2 week trip unexpectedly took 4 months. those SIM cards weren't physically inserted into my phone - I used to do that once a month to call someone and get billed a few cents so it would remain active, until that trip. there's no way to get those phone numbers back and it's been an enormous pain the dick. I hate this fucking system, but I hate the fact that fucking everything requires a phone number even more.
- crotchfire 3y agoin Germany at least every phone number is connected with a persons identity. To get a phone number you need to connect it to an identity using a identity card Personally, I am totally baffled by this. Due in large part to C3's positive influence, Germany is at the forefront of privacy issues and legislation on so many areas, except for this one, which ends up turning into a massive backdoor in the whole edifice. Okay, we can't ask for a copy of your identification card... we'll just use a telephone number or SIM code or something trivially tied back to your IMSI (like an app store account or IMEI) instead. Because of the absurd 2017 law, these are equivalent to your government ID card. I really don't understand why Germans put up with this while simultaneously pushing so hard for positive changes in every other aspect of online privacy. Especially when so many other developed Western countries do not tie SIM cards to identities: Netherlands, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Ireland, US, UK, Canada, and many many others. It's like a giant `sudo gimme-your-identity` backdoor in all the other data collection protections. And nobody seems to care about closing the backdoor.
- moepstar 3y agoIt wasn't always like this - the requirement to give your ID to get a SIM card, as you noted, was only introduced in 2017 (though it certainly feels way longer ago for me). Anyways - why does nobody care? Simple: most don't feel this being an issue. Some may even say that they "don't have anything to hide" and there goes the erosion of privacy, bit by bit - by the time someone notices "ok, this may become a problem" - it'll be too late :(
- crotchfire 3y agoSimple: most don't feel this being an issue. Sure, but what's incredibly weird is that many Germans do feel that almost all other digital privacy matters are an issue. It baffles me that they treat this one particular issue differently for some reason. I wonder if this is some kind of mass-psychology exploit, like it doesn't occur to your average nontechnical person that the ID requirement makes your Apple app store account, and every app you use it to install, equivalent to your government photo ID.
- 3y ago
- ossguy 3y agoWhy do you need a German phone number? Many countries let anyone have a phone number, with no proof of address or other identifying information. Just use one of those numbers instead. One example service is https://jmp.chat/ https://jmp.chat/ but there are many others.
- herbst 3y agoIt's a voip service isn't it? Those numbers will not work with many online services and even some more obscure normal providers.
- ossguy 3y agoBasically everything is VoIP these days (VoLTE, etc.). Online services sometimes have secret lists of phone numbers they don't like, but "voipness" isn't a silver bullet for determining whether or not a service will like your number or not. The JMP people wrote more about this at https://blog.jmp.chat/b/2022-sms-account-verification https://blog.jmp.chat/b/2022-sms-account-verification Anyway, this thread is about Signal, and JMP numbers work with Signal, which is why I suggested it.
- joker99 3y agoJust use Wire (wire.com). True end to end encrypted multi device messenger, open source, federated and based on MLS. All you need is an email address, no phone number required. And based in Europe. They allow building your own clients (with some stipulations) and seem to solve everyone’s issues with signal here
- bcye 3y agoNo, a for-profit corporation providing a free messaging service really isn't the solution.
- illiac786 3y agoThis is not correct. Go to a phone booth, get Signal, never need the phone number again. Any phone will do. Get a phone number from a different country online and without identity check, who cares, you will never need it again.
- jesterson 3y agowouldn't the next bloke using the booth for same cause get the whole account?
- illiac786 3y agoNot if you set a PIN no. But I think the next bloke can't use the booth to create a signal account anymore. I don't think we'll run out of booth though considering how rare the use case is ;)
- jesterson 3y agoWell, phone booths ain’t getting more ubiquitous for whatever reason either :)
- illiac786 3y agoI feel it’s really 5 HN hard core privacy persons who want it. I have 5 booth in walking distance from my home, they can have them =) Even the one who want it seem not to know about “registration block” and “PIN” concepts in Signal, so I seriously question if they really want it…
- boobsbr 3y agoI haven't seen a phone booth in Europe for the last 7 years.
- illiac786 3y agoJust use the wonderful openstreetmap to find the nearest one, it will be closer than you think.
- dominojab 3y ago[dead]
- giireon 3y agoIt's still preferable to use a burner number for signal/telegram if you want privacy.
- the_gipsy 3y agoThere are many countries where it's completely impossible to get a burner phone.
- WhyNotHugo 3y agoPartially off-topic: I've always found this German requirement baffling. In the Netherlands you can just buy a SIM card at a supermarket and pay cash. No identity, nothing.