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Comment by moxie | Hacker News Reader

If we were going to rank our priorities, they would be in this order:

1) Make mass surveillance impossible. 2) Stop targeted attacks against crypto nerds.

It's not that we don't find #2 laudable, but optimizing for #1 takes precedence when we're making decisions. It's totally possible for you to install Signal on an iPod touch with a VoIP number, for instance, but that takes more effort than the common case we're designing for.

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Any chance of not requiring access to the whole contact list? I think there are pickers that allow selecting one contact - or better yet, one could allow adding contacts inside Signal.

Probably not because they check that against the list of people who have Signal installed so they can send encrypted messages to the people who support it. They talk more about how they try to do this privately in [0].

[0]: https://whispersystems.org/blog/contact-discovery/

I had a problem where one of my contracts uninstalled Textsecure, and went back to the vanilla SMS app. Now all the messages he received from me are garbled. Somehow they need a way to disassociate phones AFTER the app has been uninstalled.

You can ask your contact to use the unregister app here https://whispersystems.org/textsecure/unregister/

Apple offer a similar tool when leaving iOS https://selfsolve.apple.com/deregister-imessage

This is one of the reasons why they don't do encrypted SMS anymore:

https://whispersystems.org/blog/goodbye-encrypted-sms/

Wouldn't that be a huge security flaw? Someone with access to your phone could uninstall the app then read all the messages.

which is silly. that should be fine for people already advertising their contact list for facebook, wasapp, etc. but there should have been a isolated account setup for people not doing so

It is a little inconvenient but I have registered for Signal using Google Voice. Much more easily done on iOS than on Android though.

moxie,

Please consider my suggestions here. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10501636

I would argue that an identifier is just that: an identifier. It does not need to be a number nor does it have to be for an indefinite amount of time.

Lastly, please consider disabling the debug log by default

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