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Comment by anon7331 | Hacker News Reader

It doesn't have user IDs... seems like an odd selling point... if you have good end to end encryption who cares if you have user IDs? I imagine you could do network analysis and so on to try an determine a network of people to deanonymize... but if you have encrypted chats, you have no context... unless guilt by association is enough.

On the other hand, a bigger problem than IDs would probably be IP addresses, etc. Random IDs per-conversation would also go a long way.

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"We kill people based on metadata."

https://abcnews.go.com/blogs/headlines/2014/05/ex-nsa-chief-...

That's pretty tame compared to what potentates the world over do with metadata.

If you are considering writing a communications tool for humanitarian reasons, you have to consider that people are thrown into holes and forgotten for looking like they might be in cahoots with someone deemed bad by the powers that be (but not necessarily by the world at large)

If they aim at tech enthusiasts and privacy conscious people then that won't be a problem. But I doubt this messenger will gain any attention among wider regular audience because exactly of lack of user ID system. Majority of people needs an easy way to get in touch with family, friends and everyone else and that's done with IDs. Scanning qr codes is easy nowadays but to build a messenger around this it just feels like a missed idea.

Somehow I'm also amused by this clip where woman points qr code at webcam.

Btw. there's Session - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28715627

There are three types of people who seek strong anonymity: whistle blowers, criminals, and tech-nerd posers. For this reason any viable, strong anonymous comms solution is doomed to be misused 2/3 of the time.

Nice and easy life in your little world... :)

But in reality there is not an equal distribution between these 3 groups. And there is a high probability that the user base is not as limited as in your pseudo factual simplification. (journalists come to mind for example etc. pp)

Sometimes who someone is talking to is enough to cause them problems. If we all had a unique ID for every person we talk to, there's no way to build a social graph. Even if IDs are pseudonymous, there's no forward secrecy there, once you've identified a participant in one social connection you've identified them in all of their social connections. Simplex solves this. Who everyone knows, even if you don't know the surname of everyone involved, is useful information to an adversary.

One "user ID" I could imagine right now would be the username.

In my experince with my volunteer job, we sort of do this. Querying a user's profile via the API only needs a username. I assume they're going to actually use the user ID in the next major release, but I highly doubt it.

I fear you are not aware of what AI models can pick out these days. Even encryption is not enough unless padded with constant-broadcast. If you know a medium is a text channel, the size, frequency, and rate of communications can accurately determine user emotional state, age, and gender, as well as possible subject matters and the relative position of power of conversation participants (who is boss, who is right hand, who are minions, etc)

If it doesn't have user IDs what's that QR code I can share?

Isn't that a QR code of a communication channel?

I haven't tested, but if it will always lead to me unless I take some action, then it is a user ID.

it's quite alright, though these days the metadata matters more than the actual data.

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