3 ms·

If your concern is "muh phone number", then you can pay and not have to give the phone number to sign up. It's already the case today (and has been for years)

If your concern is "muh phone number", then you can pay and not have to give the phone number to sign up. It's already the case today (and has been for years) that you don't need to give strangers your phone number to chat on Signal. My username is soatok.45; try to get my phone number if you can. If you want absolutely no info to be collected, ever, and there to be zero cost on the end user too, be prepared to welcome your new spam overlords. Because the people who will benefit the most from a zero cost signup that only requires a username are spammers.

my-huge-pony 22d ago
I'm a bit surprised by this dismissal. Of course some info must be collected, or there must be some cost to enter (probably both I mean phone number is also a cost, but one most people already sunk). But we can still debate the best way, right? For example: * Are you absolutely positive signal will never have a bug that let attackers reveal contact phone numbers? I really trust in their secure coding skills, but this class of vulnerabilities (like 2fa leaj) happened to even the biggest players. * One of the reasons signal collects phone numbers (and asks for a contacts permission) is to check which contracts are already on signal. For some people or in some governments even having a signal account is an opsec problem (to be fair, they have a secure privacy-preserving protocol for this - as you know - and it's possible to avoid this footgun if necessary)