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Privacy is Priceless, but Signal is Expensive (signal.org)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 50 points 2 years ago (3 children)

The cost of these registration services for verifying phone numbers when people first install Signal, or when they re-register on a new device, currently averages around $6 million dollars per year.

That's pretty crazy. Wonder which third party providers they are using. Maybe the identity verification methods we have today is due for some significant changes?

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  • [–] 43 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    Yeah, I wasn't expecting that to be the bulk of their spending. Maybe they should remove the need for phone numbers now they removed SMS.

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  • [–] 16 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    SMS is dead, so they will need to move on eventually. Most carriers are moving towards high data plans now. I mainly use it for verification, although I'd rather use more secure methods.

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  • [–] [S] 8 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Well, if SMS is dead then RCS is what we get instead, and there's no difference to us (and probably higher costs for Signal & al.)

    And there are wayyyy too many things that depend on SMS for it to be dead any time soon, too :)

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago

    Also Signal cannot add RCS support, because Google Jibe servers won't allow other app than Google Messages... And you must use them because native RCS support for Android is halted for years... And you cannot install some module with RCS support yourself because of anti-Unix monolitic Android userspace architecture...

    Man, there are so many things done wrong.

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  • [–] 0 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    They are working on that! :)

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  • [–] [S] 5 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    No, I think they are merely working on user ids no longer mandating to be your phone number (so that it can be pseudonymous, e.g. tja@signal instead of +xx0123456@signal), I don't believe they hope to drop SMS verification at this point because of the spam issue getting worse otherwise

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    identity verification is trash anyways, we don't need it

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  • [–] 12 points 2 years ago (5 children)

    The article says it's to limit spam. I don't feel platforms like Lemmy (or the other platform) are particularly spammy though. On the other hand I get a lot more spam on Whatsapp, even though it's phone number bound.

    Signal is pretty good in terms of limited spam, but I'm curious about the impact if they A/B test the removal and see how much spam would arise. Obviously that could only be implemented after they remove the need to add contact via phone number.

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  • [–] 22 points 2 years ago

    If more people joined Lemmy you’d see the amount of spam this place would get. Now it’s only a bunch of nerds who will quickly report any spammy activity. It’s a small “friendly” community for now.

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  • [–] 5 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    If you go to Reddit which is more popular for bots certain subs are completely filled with spam and votebots. r/worldnews is like a giant circle of pro IDF bots jerking eachother off. LSF became a shitshow too.

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