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Oh yeah, privacy oriented messaging app requires phone number for sign up. Telegram has this feature for years already? It seems to me that they are positioning themselves as privacy saviours just because they are non-profit organization and their app is open source.

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It is privacy with respect to government surveillance and the like. Not the kind where you mistrust your contacts.

Not really the case with signal anymore. if you want privacy you should look elsewhere.

Care to elaborate?

I posted links to a lot of information here: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=autoexec#39445866

The TL;DR is that they collect and forever store sensitive data in the cloud, meaning that the US gov could almost certainly access that data and any other government could access any one person's data too just by brute forcing a PIN

That link isn't quite right... if you scroll down enough you'll still get to the relevant bits, but here's a corrected link (I hope) https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=autoexec&next=394457...

Maybe in the US you don‘t need to mandatory register a phone number with a valid id, in most of the world you have to. If anyone can require the phone company to reveal your identity, it‘s the government.

BTW I am probably getting downvotes from Signal's fanboys who refuse to do their research.

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