Privacy

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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

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Why does Signal want a phone number to register if it's supposedly privacy first? (programming.dev)

submitted 21 hours ago by 0101100101@programming.dev 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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[–] southsamurai@sh.itjust.works 49 points 21 hours ago

Everything is a balancing act. Privacy, anonymity, and security aren't the same things. They're sometimes, and in some aspects always, difficult to achieve without compromising one of the other two.

When you add in the goal of quick, easy setup to make the service useful in the first place. Doesn't matter how good the service is at the trinity if nobody is willing to use it. Signal just errs on security first, privacy second, anonymity third.