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 1 day 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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[–] autonomoususer@lemmy.world 16 points 1 day ago* (last edited 5 hours ago) (1 children)

Signal is not perfect but we control its app, libre software. See SimpleX Chat.

Escaping WhatsApp and Discord, anti-libre software, is more important.

[–] Mio@feddit.nu 2 points 23 hours ago (4 children)

Why we need to defeat those first? We can go straight to SimpleX?

[–] celia@lemmy.blahaj.zone 9 points 23 hours ago (1 children)

What SimpleX, Signal, or any app like this need first and foremost is traction, as new users generate more new users. One of Signal's goals is usability (usually achieved by being simple, as in no complexity for the end user). In my opinion SimpleX lacks that. This is the same reason Signal needs a phone number: populating your contact list with users already on the platform

[–] foremanguy92_@lemmy.ml 2 points 23 hours ago (1 children)

You can go to Simplex (for sure a lot of people here already done it) but if only privacy nerds get to this place this is not a great solution. We (I'm talking about us using Lemmy and chatting on SimpleX) must convince people, starting by friends and family to stop using these fucking socials then at this point SimpleX will be considered as a viable alternative

[–] endeavor@sopuli.xyz 0 points 15 hours ago

Because the entire point of using communication programs is to communicate with people other than yourself.