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Using Signal groups for activism
(micahflee.com)
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this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2025
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Does it not give away your identity when you join a Signal group?
Signal defaults to hiding your phone number since the release of user names: https://signal.org/blog/phone-number-privacy-usernames/
But they must still have your phone number and associate it with your username. So it would still be easy for a government organization to force Signal to give up the identities of all people who join a group.
Wrong. Signal servers don't know of group members.
Really? That's interesting. But the group membership list must be persisted somewhere, no? Otherwise, you wouldn't know where to send and receive messages. So where is it persisted then?
And also, how would you add someone to a group? When you add a new user to a group, would he be able to view all previous messages? Is it possible for this to scale to, say, a thousand or a million users?
https://signal.org/blog/signal-private-group-system/
They can't get your username from your phone number (but they can b'get your phone number from your username)
Not worried about my phone number, I'm more worried about my profile.
Your profile, like everything else on Signal, is also end-to-end encrypted. Your name and profile picture do get shared with whoever you chat with, groups or individuals. If you don't want your name and profile picture shared with randos, either don't set them or don't chat with randos.
That's fine if one of those ends isn't a public activism group.
I use Signal to talk to people I actually know, both personally and professionally. I don't want to message them from some sort of unidentifiable alias. And if I did they would know my alias and could disclose it to law enforcement.
You mean randos like you might find in a public activism group chat? Yes, that was my point, thank you.