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this post was submitted on 11 May 2025
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Privacy
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They do. Otherwise anyone can register with your phone number and start messaging as if they were you.
If you want more privacy you'd need something like Simplex.
They need to verify using a phone number because otherwise other people could sign up using your phone number and pretend to be you? What?
They can only sign up using your phone number if they do require a phone number. If they didn't ask for a phone number then how would people sign up using your phone number?
Signal's internal identifiers are, of course, not phone numbers. And you can download their server and host it without requiring phone numbers for registration. Just they simply can't afford it, they need to prevent bots from registering and sending messages somehow. A group message is stored in Signal as many times as there are group members, for example.
... but why require numbers in the first place.