this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2025
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[–] Ulrich@feddit.org 26 points 2 weeks ago (26 children)

If you join a large WhatsApp group, anyone in that group will have everyone else's phone number, and they can use that to learn far more about everyone's identities.

Does it not give away your identity when you join a Signal group?

[–] blah3166@piefed.social 46 points 2 weeks ago (8 children)

Signal defaults to hiding your phone number since the release of user names: https://signal.org/blog/phone-number-privacy-usernames/

[–] namingthingsiseasy@programming.dev -3 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

But they must still have your phone number and associate it with your username. So it would still be easy for a government organization to force Signal to give up the identities of all people who join a group.

[–] ouch@lemmy.world 11 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Wrong. Signal servers don't know of group members.

[–] namingthingsiseasy@programming.dev 1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Really? That's interesting. But the group membership list must be persisted somewhere, no? Otherwise, you wouldn't know where to send and receive messages. So where is it persisted then?

And also, how would you add someone to a group? When you add a new user to a group, would he be able to view all previous messages? Is it possible for this to scale to, say, a thousand or a million users?

[–] teolan@lemmy.world 1 points 1 week ago

They can't get your username from your phone number (but they can b'get your phone number from your username)

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