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Comment by 2Gkashmiri | Hacker News Reader

hey. i just thought of something. is it not possible for india or iran in this case to check your phone number and see if it is active on signal? if you are online means you are somehow bypassing their blocks. isnt then just a matter of tracking your cellphone and relevant xkcd applies ?https://xkcd.com/538/

this is looking like a zero sum game unless signal account is delinked from phone numbers because the govt can play cat and mouse game indefinitely

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all they need to do is be in the approximate region of the cell signal through triangulation to figure out the phone numbers / unique identifiers attached to the phone.

then its a matter of time before they link real identity to the phone. With the wide availability of femtocells, all they need to do is get lucky once.

This puts operators of Signal proxies at potential harms way! Absolutely irresponsible for people on HN to downvote and downplay genuine security concerns.

oh. you are not joining all the dots here. an offensive govt already has KYC on cellphones. they can pull your details in a second. My reasoning. they have a list of say 100 users. every govt has lists. they check that list against signal users as "social graph" and voila, they know you are online or not. second, kyc documents show who you are so you are good as toast

How is a proxy operator in harm’s way? They aren’t in Iran, and the Iranian government understands the consequences of trying to do anything about it. Users are in no more danger than they’ve always been, and substantially less than if they didn’t have communications ability.

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