Signal’s New Usernames Help Keep the Cops Out of Your Data
Ephemeral usernames instead of phone numbers safeguard privacy — and makes the Signal messenger app even harder to subpoena.
Unless signal demonstrates they can't link usernames to phone numbers, I call BS.
Privacy by policy is great, but it's not zero knowledge. Since they designed the system to ultimately identify people to phone numbers there will always be the potential they are logging all the username phone numbers hash lookup tables
It`s good to always be sceptic, however I have been using and following Signal for years and so far they have not given me a reason to misstrust them. You should read their answers when some judge with 0 digital competence tries to subpoena some chat protocol.
The article states that they are only saving a hashed copy of the currently set username, if any. While they might in theory keep more than that on hand, their policy has always been to minimize accessible data, and have responded in kind whenever subpoenaed, which is at least a very strong evidence.
The code is also fully open source for both server and client, so you could independently validate it yourself.
Still a bit miffed they removed SMS/MMS support.
While I hate the dominance of WhatsApp in Europe, at least we hardly use SMS anymore. What's up with that in the US?
Why is it that WhatsApp is so big in Europe? My dad is European but lives in Mexico. Only way to get through to him when he’s in Mexico seems to be through WhatsApp.
In the USA, I think the majority of people that use WhatsApp just use it for international purposes even though there is no rate difference sending a text via SMS.
Laziness.
Every phone supports SMS. It’s not all that long ago that people had feature phones, but they also supported SMS. We went through thing like Facebook Messenger, but only for Facebook users, AOL Instant Messenger but only for AOL victims. Every texting/chat app has its followers but none have become dominant enough to unseat SMS.
I don’t care what texting app I use, and SMS has sufficient features (although RCS would be better). However I care most about contacting everyone I may want to, using one texting app. That’s SMS, no contest.
Or maybe credit the dominance of Apple. I use iMessages and most people I chat with do as well. However it seamlessly Integrates with SMS so I still get all my contacts in one place
SMS was a huge factor for getting my wife on a degoogled os
My phone is set up as a tablet. It has a number but cannot send/receive SMS or calls.
It's so great.
But I guess signal's number-elitism isn't for me, still. K. I'll be cryin' into my $14 phone bills.
If you have a phone bill, you must have a phone number, right? Surely you can receive a single verification SMS without making a permanent dent in that phone bill.
