If a user is willing to put up with a less useful and usable version of Signal - they should be allowed to use it without identifying themselves.
Beyond this issue, there are others that me show a troubling pattern. For example, Moxie has refused to post a "warrant canary" for US National Security Letters.
In spirit, I like Moxie, in practice, I feel like he's the captain of ship flying a false flag.
OWS recently received a subpoena and fought to be able to publish it (and their response), the only data they could provide were registration and last contact timestamps.
And if it is face2face, scanning a barcode like e.g. Threema supports is even quicker.
Different apps for different categories of users.
I'm not convinced that "just put my phone number 0394859489 in" is so much easier than "I don't have my phone number in there, just type in horse-battery-staple" that not having the second option is a large usability win. Or "give me your phone number and i'll add you" ;)
It's very laudable that Signal tries to be perfectly easy, with as few options as possible, but on the other hand I feel the overdo it in many cases where a slightly more manual, hidden way would help to mitigate issues. If it works for you it's fine, if it doesn't (either through convention or actual bugs, the latter ones are a bigger issue for me) you are out of luck. That's not great for adoption either.
I think signal:wtbob works just as well as tel:+15551212, if we want to continue to rely on OWS as a central identity provider.
I think that 'mom's dad's sister June' also works, if we want decentralised identity.
That doesn't work as well for auto-discovery of other Signal users, though. The latter enables auto-discovery based on people whose phone numbers are already in one's contact books. With the former, one needs to collect other people's usernames. It's not a tough thing to do, but it does make auto-discovery difficult.
It does if one's Contacts app stores Signal contact information for one's contacts; then one could simply query using non-Signal information as the key (e.g. one could ask, 'give me Signal contact information for tel:+15551212, mailto:fizzbuzz@barquux.org and http://plus.google.com/SomeUserName').
That doesn't seem like a very good tradeoff because then it requires Signal to store/compare _more_ personally identifying information (though I guess you could make many of those things pseudo-anonymous).
Actually, it's possible to do even better that that: one can execute a private set intersection protocol so that you & each of your contacts can discover mutual contacts without revealing others.
Signal aren't required to store any personally identifying information: they choose to do so.
Can you expand on that? I'm not sure quite what you mean.
Also, my great aunt is called June.
Sure! It derives from the SDSI/SPKI work of the late 90s, which demonstrated how one can use petnames (i.e., local nicknames) for people, and then refer to a contact's petnames via one's petname for that contact.
So you might refer to a name (mom dad June).
Did you fudge the last example though? My mum's dad is not called June. Or am I misunderstanding?
You can just get a VOIP number or burner phone somewhere in a relatively anonymous manner, register it with Signal on your android phone, and go about your business if anonymity is an important requirement for you.
Definitely a hassle, but for anyone for whom a phone number is insufficiently anonymous I would imagine they're used to it.
I admittedly don't know as much about the options for VOIP but I've got to to believe there's a way to get a phone number on the internet where you can receive SMS and keep it active indefinitely.