Signal requiring phone number, thoughts on anonymity?
signal requires a phone number to sign up. a phone number could be used to trace your signal account back to you. so why do people, especially privacy enthusiasts and experts (like edward snowden), still use it and endorse it when it lacks anonymity in that sense? i get that people could use a voip number or something to sign up, but still.
Well I don’t get spam from signal. However if you want anonymity find something else. Or don’t talk to anyone. Most of our cellphones leak all kinds of data you won’t get privacy in most phones and you shouldn’t expect it either.
Signal is great for private communication with people you already know and trust. I was in a situation where I was organizing with new friends, and we had a big group chat on Signal. I cloned Signal to a work profile, and registered it with a cheap VOIP number, so that I could keep my real phone number separate from my political organizing activities.
Then you need both anonymity and privacy. Sometimes you do need both but they’re not the same concept.
Privacy without anonymity is you using the bathroom with everyone seeing you walking in. They know you used the bathroom but have no idea what you did inside.
Anonymity without privacy is like you pissing on the street with a ski mask on. Everyone saw what you did but no one knows who you are.
Having both is walking into the bathroom with a ski mask on. No one knows who you are nor what you did inside.
They've repeatedly stated that they're working on removing the need to share your phone number with your contacts, but that's taking some time, because they want to implement it in a way that does not involve storing your entire social graph on their servers.
You'll still have to sign up with your phone number, but the only thing that can be traced back is that your phone number is registered on Signal - and only by subpoenaing Signal, I believe.
Btw, the main thing to realise, is that Signal is trying to tread the delicate balance of being accessible and private. If you have the perfect private messenger but nobody uses it, that doesn't help democracy one bit. So starting out with an easier-to-implement mechanism that also helps adoption (because people can get notified when people they already have in their contact list join), that still protects against indiscriminate mass surveillance, makes sense to me, even if it means your contacts can still know who you are.
They made a mistake in removing SMS support - that was a good way to become useful to people with the current paradigm and encourage them over to the new. Sometimes Signals decisions are self destructive.
I still have signal but I use it much less since it stopped SMS support; I just open it less and so when starting conversations default to WhatsApp. For a while signal was growing amongst my friends and colleagues but it appears to have stalled.
Google are now doing the same pushing their RCS in the default SMS app in Android.
But yes, it was really nice when I could use it as my SMS app. Then again, very few people in my country use SMS in the first place - it's all WhatsApp, and it was never able to have support for that. Luckily, most of my friends have adopted Signal by now.
A messenger can at best be pseudonymous, since you want your friends to be able to find you.
And in practice, a mobile messenger that actually works (i.e. makes your phone go “ping” when someone sends you a message, not hours later) will always be traceable to you, as it needs to be able to deliver the message.
Also, regardless whether Signal is perfect or not, it’s the one privacy friendly messenger that people actually use. A messenger where you can reach only your privacy-extremist friends is useless. Signal is already on the extreme end for most people, trying to push anything “more perfect” (but more niche) will just make people use WhatsApp.
This is a well known issue for a lot of people and signal has been promising to fix this for years. Using a phone # for verification reduces spam and bot accounts, but like you said it drastically reduces anonymity.
That said, anonymity != privacy. You could anonymously place a note on a car telling the owner to learn to park, but it’s not private since anyone walking by could read it. Likewise you can send an encrypted signal message to another user who knows who you are, so it’s private, but not anonymous.
Signal is a privacy first app. Do I wish it would not use a telephone number? Absolutely! But they never claim to be anonymous. This said with something like juicysms.com you can register signal and many other services with a number in the USA, the Netherlands or the UK (the Netherlands is the best option here)
If you look for an app what don’t need a telephone number check simplex or session. Perhaps something like the matrix protocol and element would be a great option too.
I don’t undestand this comment, could you please elaborate?
The way I way I see it, privacy without anonymity only works if you can trust a service provider. Since there are no trustworthy providers, especially since legislation can cancel any assurances anyone could give you, anonymity becomes the only way to ensure privacy, making it virtually synonymous.
You know I live in that house across the street, but my blinds are closed and I don’t let you in. That’s privacy, despite your knowledge.
There’s a glass house across town. You drive by, but you don’t know who lives there, who owns it, or why they insist on walking around naked. Anonymous, albeit open.
Also while it seems ideal to have both (don’t know who lives there or what they’re up to), it’s much harder to implement in a way that there aren’t ethical/legal headaches.
It can also be easier from the usability side, like if you want to get in touch with your friend and you know where they are living today.
I’d like to have the option to not use a number, and it would help those that live under authoritarian regimes, but I don’t think I’ll go through the trouble of removing mine once they implement it
Privacy means that you can talk/act safely in your own closed-off space while no-one knows what you do. The opposite of private is public.
Anonymity means that you can safely talk/act in public space while no-one knows who does it. The opposite of anonymous is … identified.
If you want your talk be private while doing it in public or via an untrusted service, you can use obfuscation/encryption of the content/payload data of your talk (still anyone could receive it and know it’s from you and if they have the key they can decipher it).
If you want to be anonymous in public space, you have to obfuscate the metadata of your talk (so that no-one knows who said it but anyone can still receive it).
*And here is a bit of an overlap depending on where we want to draw the boundary of our privacy realm. In some cases, the knowledge about metadata like location and time of a message can be breach privacy while in other cases this is irrelevant.
You could also do both, meaning you’d have an anonymous appearance in a public/untrusted space, having a conversation with only those people who have the key to your messages. That’s a stunt which is not easily accomplished, as obviously you’ll need a way to let others know how to reach you, and exchange keys (in other words, you’ll have to first make an appointment in private and in a trusted space).
[wanted to write two sentences, no so much text :-D]
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