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Why does Signal want a phone number to register if it's supposedly privacy first? (programming.dev)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/privacy@lemmy.ml
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I remember a time when visiting a website that opens a javacript dialog box asking for your name so the message "hi " could be displayed was baulked at.

Why does signal want a phone number to register? Is there a better alternative?

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[–] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

Did.. Did you just read the problem they were trying to solve, and just, skip the solution?

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

    No.

    We have been exploring techniques to further reduce the amount of information that is accessible to the service, and the latest beta release includes changes designed to move Signal incrementally closer to the goal of hiding another piece of metadata: who is messaging whom.

    They haven't hidden it yet. It's a goal.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago*

    What?

    1. That blog entry is almost 7 years old. Sealed Sender came a long time ago.

    2. The literal quote you provide has a link on "exploring techniques" that you didn't click. It takes you to another blog post for the launch of Private Contact Discovery, which takes you to a repo of the service, but because your cutting and pasting such old stuff even that's been replaced by a V2.

    Please take a step back and read the technical docs, or at least more recent info.

    As ratcheting and chaining are used, messages are sent with rotating keys on ebery message as the sender/recipient identifiers for the messages, not the phone number. It would be way easier to tap Google for Firebase notifications to get to what you are talking about.

    And the capability argument is moot if it's been proven in court to not be done today. You could say that about any service that uses push notifications that go through cloud providers.

    Tagging @onlinepersona@programming.dev

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