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 19 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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[–] onlinepersona@programming.dev 3 points 8 hours ago (2 children)

There is a lot of FUD here. It's just like anti-vaxxers claiming vaccines make you autistic or have microchips in them: they don't understand what they're talking about, have different threat models, and are paranoid.

Messages are private on signal and they cannot be connected to you through sealed sender. There have been multiple audits and even government requests for information which have returned only the phone number and last connection time.

Anti Commercial-AI license

[–] autonomoususer@lemmy.world 1 points 36 minutes ago

So, they do not need our phone numbers but they still demand it.

Despite this, escaping WhatsApp and Discord, anti-libre software, is more important.

[–] cypherpunks@lemmy.ml 14 points 8 hours ago

Messages are private on signal and they cannot be connected to you through sealed sender.

No. Signal's sealed sender has an incoherent threat model and only protects against an honest server, and if the server is assumed to be honest then a "no logs" policy would be sufficient.

Sealed sender is complete security theater. And, just in case it is ever actually difficult for the server to infer who is who (eg, if there are many users behind the same NAT), the server can also simply turn it off and the client will silently fall back to "unsealed sender". 🤡

The fact that they go to this much dishonest effort to convince people that they "can't" exploit their massive centralized trove of activists' metadata is a pretty strong indicator of one answer to OP's question.