Privacy

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

submitted 22 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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[–] cypherpunks@lemmy.ml 2 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

You can just make a group for each contact with all of your (and their) devices in it.

[–] MajesticElevator@lemmy.zip 4 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

It’s still a shitty workaround

If people contact me, I can’t expect them to create a group..

[–] cypherpunks@lemmy.ml 1 points 5 hours ago

You can configure one or more of your profiles' addresses to be a "business address" which means that when people contact you via it it will always create a new group automatically. Then you can (optionally, on a per-contact basis) add your other devices' profiles to it (as can your contact with their other devices, after you make them an admin of the group).

It's not the most obvious/intuitive system but it works well and imo this paradigm is actually better than most systems' multi-device support in that you can see which device someone is sending from and you can choose to give different contacts access to a different subset of your devices than others.