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Reduce spam bot accounts and other malware, as well as to allow for user discovery so you can find your contacts more easily. It's not designed to be an anonymous service, just a private one.
this post was submitted on 11 May 2025
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Privacy
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It’s not designed to be an anonymous service, just a private one.
I think this needs to be said a lot more often and a lot louder. Anonymous and private are NOT necessarily the same thing, nor should the expectation be that they are. Both have a purpose.
in the end of the day, the end user needs an id. this is perfect for the everyday user, but obviously if you are writing anti regime articles, you might want to look around for more anonim apps.
perfect for the everyday user
...because of course, they don't need privacy, do they now. "Nothing to hide" and all that jazz.
The amount of trolls in this thread that either try to spew false information intentionally or just have no idea what they are talking about is insane.
If you are worried about what data (including your phone number) law enforcement can recieve (if they have your specific user ID, which is not equal to your phone number) from the Signal company check this: https://propertyofthepeople.org/document-detail/?doc-id=21114562 Tldr: It's the date of registration and last time user was seen online. No other information, Signal just doesn't have any other and this is by design.
If you want to know more about how they accomplish that feat you can check out the sealed sender feature: https://nerdschalk.com/what-is-sealed-sender-in-signal-and-should-you-enable-it/
or the private contact discovery system: https://signal.org/blog/private-contact-discovery/
Also as Signal only requires a valid phone number for registration you might try some of these methods (not sure if they still work): https://theintercept.com/2024/07/16/signal-app-privacy-phone-number/
This shows they do not need our phone numbers but they still demand it.
Despite this, escaping WhatsApp and Discord, anti-libre software, is more important.
edit: it's funny how people downvoting comments about signal's sealed sender being a farce never even attempt to explain what its threat model is supposed to be. (meaning: what attacks, with which adversary capabilities specifically, is it designed to prevent?)
Downvoted as you let them bait you. Escaping WhatsApp and Discord, anti-libre software, is more important.
Downvoted as you let them bait you. Escaping WhatsApp and Discord, anti-libre software, is more important.
I don't know what you mean by "bait" here, but...
Escaping to a phone-number-requiring, centralized-on-Amazon, closed-source-server-having, marketed-to-activists, built-with-funding-from-Radio-Free-Asia (for the specific purpose of being used by people opposing governments which the US considers adversaries) service which makes downright dishonest claims of having a cryptographically-ensured inability to collect metadata? No thanks.
(fuck whatsapp and discord too, of course.)
it's being answered in the github thread you linked. Sorry that this is not enough for you but it's enough for most people: "For people who are concerned about this sort of thing, you can enable sealed sender indicators in the settings"
it’s being answered in the github thread you linked
The answers there are only about the fact that it can be turned off and that by default clients will silently fall back to "unsealed sender".
That does not say anything about the question of what attacks it is actually meant to prevent (assuming a user does "enable sealed sender indicators").
This can be separated into two different questions:
- For an adversary who does not control the server, does sealed sender prevent any attacks? (which?)
- For an adversary who does control the server, how does sealed sender prevent that adversary from identifying the sender (via the fact that they must identify themselves to receive messages, and do so from the same IP address)?
The strongest possibly-true statement i can imagine about sealed sender's utility is something like this:
For users who enable sealed sender indicators AND who are connecting to the internet from the same IP address as some other Signal users, from the perspective of an an adversary who controls the server, sealed sender increases the size of the set of possible senders for a given message from one to the number of other Signal users who were online from behind the same NAT gateway at the time the message was sent.
This is a vastly weaker claim than saying that "by design" Signal has no possibility of collecting any information at all besides the famous "date of registration and last time user was seen online" which Signal proponents often tout.
Signal fills an incredibly important spot in a spectrum of privacy and usability where it's extremely usable without sacrificing very much privacy. Sure, to the most concerned privacy enthusits it's not the best, but it's a hell of a lot easier to convince friends and family to use Signal than something like Matrix.
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Yes, and in that time you would visit a website with your own IP address likely, likely over HTTP without SSL/TLS, likely with your vulnerable browser fingerprint. Point?
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Privacy, not anonymity. Two completely different things.
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Because the way Signal is built hosting it requires a lot of resources (storage especially), so they want spam prevention and fewer accounts per person.
Our phone numbers are not private from them.
Despite this, escaping WhatsApp and Discord, anti-libre software, is more important.
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