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Comment by daneel_w | Hacker News Reader

I trust Signal's end-to-end encryption promise, but I have a problem with the application not offering anonymity or privacy. By demanding users to provide a cell phone number to enable their accounts, they are connecting actual people to the Signal accounts and consequently also allowing them (or someone else) to visualize social networks; in intelligence gathering, data such as who speaks to whom, at what hours, with what message frequency etc. is highly valuable. It's also important that users ask themselves how Signal manages to finance all the SMS costs and the infrastructure when the application is gratis and free from ads.

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The exact opposite privacy thing is happening with Signal. They use your phone number because your phone links it to your contacts, which Signal uses as its "buddy list". By repurposing your contacts as a buddy list, Signal avoids storing any of that information itself. Virtually every other competing service stores a plaintext buddy list serverside, where it can be subpoena'd and NSL'd. The data in that buddy list is of equal value to state-level adversaries as the contents of the messages themselves.

I think --- I have no special knowledge here --- that nobody wants to do away with phone numbers more than Signal itself. That's what the "secure value storage" drama is about: using SGX to optionally vouchsafe an encrypted contact database, which would allow Signal to operate with opaque identifiers rather than contacts.

Ah, yes, because it's impossible to store a contact list client-side. Or to encrypt arbitrary data like that to store server-side! Glad Moxie's looking out for us.

Please point to the mainstream secure messenger other than Signal that doesn't store a database of contacts serverside.

Take your SIM and install it in a clean phone. Install WhatsApp and verify the account.

Notice that when you open WhatsApp, only your group memberships are populated. Individual contacts are not, because they are held on the original device.

Applications can request access to the contact list at any time. They don't need to incorporate some sort of "ask for a phone number to send an SMS to" functionality to enable this. Additionally, there's nothing preventing them letting users confirm accounts by e-mail instead of SMS.

The Signal project itself has repeatedly explained why they use phone number identifiers, which are the most controversial feature of the platform. I'm not misunderstanding them.

> By repurposing your contacts as a buddy list

My contacts aren't all my buddies and conversely many of my buddies in WhatsApp or Snapchat or whatever aren't in my contact list.

Trying to repurpose one data silo that contains contacts such as my dentist and a taxi firm and reusing it as 'buddies' is clumsy and ill-considered.

Just to add... yes, I know it's possible to register a Signal account with a disposable VLN, but how many Signal users can be expected to be "tech literate" to this level? Practically none.

Given the demographic Signal attracts that seems like an unsafe assumption.

I would guess that a significant portion of Signal's users are non-technical people dragged there by their technical friends that couldn't get them onto Matrix.

I would still guess that none is a bad assumption, however.

Edit: Spelling

Practically none. I think it's safe to assume it's not even 1 in 1000 who have registered with a VLN, or even know what one is.

You raise a valid point. I would think that probably more than 1 in 1000 would know, but suspect you are right about how many actually would do it.

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