For me this is a requirement to call a service a private service because in Germany at least every phone number is connected with a persons identity. To get a phone number you need to connect it to an identity using a identity card
Phone numbers should have NEVER became an ID. Incredibly hypocritical of Signal to claim "privacy focus" when the lowest layer of the system is literally the least secure identification method we have.
I had two SIM cards dedicated to online crap - one for important stuff like banking, another for social media and such.
both have expired after ≈ 3 months of inactivity, when my 2 week trip unexpectedly took 4 months. those SIM cards weren't physically inserted into my phone - I used to do that once a month to call someone and get billed a few cents so it would remain active, until that trip.
there's no way to get those phone numbers back and it's been an enormous pain the dick. I hate this fucking system, but I hate the fact that fucking everything requires a phone number even more.
Personally, I am totally baffled by this.
Due in large part to C3's positive influence, Germany is at the forefront of privacy issues and legislation on so many areas, except for this one, which ends up turning into a massive backdoor in the whole edifice. Okay, we can't ask for a copy of your identification card... we'll just use a telephone number or SIM code or something trivially tied back to your IMSI (like an app store account or IMEI) instead. Because of the absurd 2017 law, these are equivalent to your government ID card.
I really don't understand why Germans put up with this while simultaneously pushing so hard for positive changes in every other aspect of online privacy. Especially when so many other developed Western countries do not tie SIM cards to identities: Netherlands, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Ireland, US, UK, Canada, and many many others.
It's like a giant `sudo gimme-your-identity` backdoor in all the other data collection protections. And nobody seems to care about closing the backdoor.
Anyways - why does nobody care?
Simple: most don't feel this being an issue.
Some may even say that they "don't have anything to hide" and there goes the erosion of privacy, bit by bit - by the time someone notices "ok, this may become a problem" - it'll be too late :(
Sure, but what's incredibly weird is that many Germans do feel that almost all other digital privacy matters are an issue. It baffles me that they treat this one particular issue differently for some reason.
I wonder if this is some kind of mass-psychology exploit, like it doesn't occur to your average nontechnical person that the ID requirement makes your Apple app store account, and every app you use it to install, equivalent to your government photo ID.
Even if this is true, how does that benefit Germans?
Nobody's seriously talking about blocking all SMSes at the national border.
That's the entirely wrong cause and effect.
The obvious root cause are a world war and the DDR.
C3 is the catalyst that turned that caring into actual tangible results. Or at least a big part of the catalyst. Their level of political effectiveness is extremely unusual in the hacker world. I'm glad it has been a force for positive change.
That said, it has limits. And I have heard rumblings before about the telecom giants (DT) being an insurmountable political obstacle. So hacker culture has more political influence in Germany than elsewhere, as long as it doesn't upset the telecom giants.
If we take privacy issue, it can be divided into 3 segments:
* Privacy of user data. The basic level. When you use Google or Apple, they collect data. Even if you minimize all settings — data is still collected. This data is used to train models and models is used to sell ads, target you or do anything else you have no clue about (like reselling it to hundred of “partners”).
* Privacy against undesired identification. Next layer of privacy. When you want to have some personal life online without sharing much about you. Like Reddit, anonymous forums, or Telegram (to some degree).
* Privacy against governments. The ultimate boss of privacy. When you want to hide from all governments in the world your identity.
Signal was perfect at first layer strong but not perfect at 3rd layer (e2e encryption, no data collection to share nothing with governments who seek for data, good privacy settings, always tell you if your peer logged to new device to protect from cases when government operates with telecom companies and use sms password to make a new login), and almost non present at 2nd because they have no public features except group chats where you share your number.
Now they in one move close gaps at 2nd layer — you can hide phone number and stay fully anonymous, and strength their positions in 3rd layer, leaving the last piece open: government still will know that you have some Signal account.
As for me, this setup solves 99,999% cases for regular people in democratic and semi-democratic countries and address the most fundamental one: privacy of data and actions online.
Yes it is not perfect but barrier for government to spy on me is that high that I reasonably can believe that in most cases you should never be worried about being spied, especially if you live in some places which are named not as Iran or Russia.
The only scenario, in my perspective, you can want to have a login without phone (with all sacrifices to spam accounts, quality of peers and usual troll fiesta in such places) is when you want to do something you don’t want ever be found in your current country.
But in this case, IMO, Signal is the last worry you usually have on your mind and there are a lot of specialized services and protocols to address your need.
That isn't true anymore and hasn't been for years. Signal collects your data and keeps it forever in the cloud.
Just to be safe here's a copy/paste with the details:
This has been true for many years now. At the time it caused a major uproar among the userbase (myself included) whose concerns were almost entirely ignored. Their misleading communication at the time caused a lot of confusion, but if you didn't know that Signal was collecting this data that should tell you everything you need to know about how trustworthy they are.
Here's some reading from the time of the change:
https://community.signalusers.org/t/proper-secure-value-secu...
https://community.signalusers.org/t/dont-want-pin-dont-want-...
https://old.reddit.com/r/signal/comments/htmzrr/psa_disablin...
https://www.vice.com/en/article/pkyzek/signal-new-pin-featur...
Note that the "solution" of disabling pins mentioned at the end of that last article was later shown to not prevent the collection and storage of user data. It was just giving users a false sense of security. To this day there is no way to opt out of the data collection.
My personal feeling is that Signal is compromised and the fact that the very first sentence of their privacy policy is a lie and they refuse to update it to detail their new data collection is a big fat dead canary warning people to find a new solution for secured communication. Other very questionable Signal moves that make me wonder if it wasn't an effort to drive people away from the platform as loudly as they were allowed to include the killing off of one of the most popular features (the ability to get both secured messages and insecure SMS/MMS in the same app) and the introduction of weird crypto shit nobody was asking for.
I use Signal because I am a "nothing to hide and I like to own my privacy as much as possible" type online person.
Signal == more peace of mind just generally in this online world we have.
Because of your mentioned points I would never recommend Signal, and rather point to Briar as a messenger and group/broadcast platform. Currently, it's still a little painful to use and e.g. QR Codes would already help so much with easing up the connection and discovery/handshake process.
But it has huge potential as both a messenger and a federated and decentralized platform.
This sounds like a bunch of bullshit.
But for solutions, can't you just buy a voip number? You just need it for registration and then can dump it. I'm sure you can buy one with cash or zcash if you're really paranoid.
While in the US I don't have to show my gov ID to get a phone number, I don't know anyone who buys a phone with cash except international students. So practically everyone is identifiable anyways. But I'm not sure this is a deal breaker since all I'm leaking is that I have registered a Signal account. AFAIK Signal only has logs of an account existing and last online with 24hr resolution (which avoids many collision deanonymization methods). Even paying with cash is hard as I'm probably caught on camera (but these usually get flushed).
So I'm legitimately curious, why is this a dealbreaker? It doesn't seem like a concern for the vast majority of people, and the problem Signal is solving is secure communication for the masses, not the most secure method possible with unbounded complexity. It's being as secure as possible while being similar in complexity to the average messenger.
No, how would my uncle in the countryside of Vietnam do that? He doesn't have a credit card -- not many here do. He doesn't speak English -- can you find a website that sells voip numbers in Vietnamese? Buying a voip number from a provider in Vietnam has the same exact KYC requirements as buying a SIM, so it is still tied to your government ID and registered forever.
Also buying a VOIP for 1 month costs something like $10 from a quick Google. Average salaries are like $1.50/hour. Nobody is going to pay an entire day's salary to buy an VOIP number they throw for a month just so they can register anonymously for chat.
So, not you can't "just" buy a voip number unless you're a rich Westerner. But who needs privacy more? People in liberal democracies or people in places like Vietnam (literally an authoritarian country where people are routinely imprisoned for speaking against the government)?
> I don't know anyone who buys a phone with cash except international students.
Everyone buys a phone with cash here because few people have credit cards, since there is no such thing as "credit ratings" and it is easy for people to disappear from their debts. There are more people in Vietnam than any country in Europe. We all use smartphones and messenger apps here, too.
Your uncle in Vietnam has a smartphone, no internet, no number, and NEEDS the signal app? He might need solar, electricity and internet first.
Anyway, this thread is about Signal, and JMP numbers work with Signal, which is why I suggested it.
Even the one who want it seem not to know about “registration block” and “PIN” concepts in Signal, so I seriously question if they really want it…
https://www.reddit.com/r/openstreetmap/comments/96sbd6/comme...
I tested it and it works for me.
(area["ISO3166-1:alpha2"="my_country_code_here"];) -> .a;
node["amenity"="telephone"].
(area.a);
(._;>;);
out body;
Guess I'll continue not using Signal or Telegram.
"amenity=phone" returns 15 matches worldwide.
"amenity:phone", "amenity:telephone" or "amenity=telephone" (no other filters) returns the same 2 matches.
EDIT:
Belgacom started removing them in 2013 in Brussels, and the rest of country followed suit. The Belgian regulator found it unnecessary to require them with the ubiquity of mobile phones.
https://www.bruxelles.be/sites/default/files/bxl/Com_.%20pre...
I see 740 phone booths in Berlin at least, as a counter example.
What if I lose my phone and want to login again on a new one. Don't they send a verification code to the number again?
Since we’re discussing not providing your phone number out of privacy/security concerns, I assume that “registration lock” and PIN are on the table, which would anyway block you from registering again using the same number after loosing your phone.
Hence, the situation is the same as with your mobile phone number: no backup, no luck.
I'd be curious if there is a study that has looked into the thresholds for different use cases at which spam account creation drops to negligible amounts and how much price vs anonymity vs difficulty factors into it.
The reasons they need it aren't really that dubious to me: they want to create a service that actual people will actually use, not just weird privacy geeks who never gave up on PGP. Using phone numbers allows for the kind of user discovery that most people expect in 2024, and requiring them inserts a barrier to mass account creation that can keep spam accounts down to a manageable level (especially given the whole point is they can't do content-based spam-filtering in the way that makes email managable).
Personally, my understanding is they've always been trying to develop the maximally private usable chat app, which requires some compromises from the theoretically maximally private chat app.
[...] Selecting “Nobody” means that if someone enters your phone number on Signal, they will not be able to message or call you, or even see that you’re on Signal. And anyone you’re chatting with on Signal will not see your phone number as part of your Profile Details page – this is true even if your number is saved in their phone’s contacts. Keep in mind that selecting “Nobody” can make it harder for people to find you on Signal.
Can't hide it from some thought police which may or may not need a court order.
And then what's the point of the super duper encryption?
What Russian police would be able to see, that in a given time period of certificate rotation at most X people communicated to Navalny.
Signal has no access to metadata, including participants in a conversation. All they know is the date of account creation and the date of the last connection.
However, if they got access to Navalni's phone, then they of course can see everything Navalni can.
Aha :)
Do you people also want the relevant xkcd? The one about the wrench...
You may have confused this information with WhatsApp which indeed keeps a lot of metadata on each user.
To me, it's much worse. A non-profit doesn't have my data but Amazon (and NSA) does. With Amazon's scale, it must be trivial to identify everyone.
See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=autoexec&next=394457...
They promise to throw this information away, which is nice but not possible to verify.
They also employ a roundabout way of encrypting this data, but as they rightly point out in their article that describes the scheme, encrypting or hashing phone numbers is not safe from a malicious attacker. The space of all possible phone numbers is so small that it could be brute forced in the blink of an eye.
You place all your trust in Signal (and Google/Apple) when you use them. That may be better than the alternatives, but it's still something we should be honest about.
That said, keep in mind that Signal and Google/Apple can also trivially backdoor your software, so unless you take specific precautions against that, the details of their middleman protection isn't terribly important.
Unsure why the downvotes, but I assume it’s from this misunderstanding of the Signal protocol.
If a person is a member of a terrorist network - or friends with someone who is - the fact that a warrant could force Signal to expose that link could mean that a court is then more likely to approve increased surveillance of your (non-Signal) communications because of that link.
On the other hand if you are a woman on Tinder and using Signal to communicate with matches, this doesn't expose you to the person you have just matched with adding your number to their phone book, uploading it to LinkedIn and then finding where you work (which is what you can do with a phone number).
My feeling is this is a reasonable compromise, but it is important people understand what it does and doesn't protect you from.
Why worry about nation-state level attacks when you can simply be hit over the head with a mallet until you give up your password?
We don’t insult each other here. Take the cheap potshots to Reddit.
>Why worry about nation-state level attacks when you can simply be hit over the head with a mallet until you give up your password?
Yes, that would be the point of obfuscation, as opposed to just encryption. End to end encryption does not prevent the $5 wrench attack, obfuscation does.
Well, an even better barrier to reduce spam would be Signal to require some official ID of people...
I'm not giving a chat app free access to all my contacts - and that includes things like Whatsapp
It's not a fair remark though, all it did was twist what I said into a inflammatory derailment.
The point is there are a lot of (usually technical) people who are too focused one aspect, but are missing the bigger picture. If you follow them, you'll probably get a communication app that only those people can/will use, which has deal breakers for mass-market adoption. And once that happens, those people probably won't use it either, since they want to communicate outside their group.
"not just weird privacy geeks who never gave up on PGP." is simply not conducive towards making your point. You can make your (otherwise solid) point and even win the argument on merit without this sort of thing.
What is the usability concern for no longer needing a phone number?
Do people really expect to still exchange phone numbers ?
Fundamentally I don't want people to call me nor SMS me (that's for spam only), most messaging services will allow contact exchange through a QR code inside the app, and if everything else fail an email address will be the most stable fallback.
Yes. This is the norm in the US.
In many countries SMS was either crazy expensive, unreliable, wall gardened to death (can't message people on other carriers...) and had no traction in the first place.
Then phone calls are also crazy expensive: I'm looking at the phone plans right now and the main focus is the data amount. Phone call options are either to only allow for super short conversations for a flat fee (less than 5min per call, for a 25% increase in the monthly plan) or 30 min to an hour of phone call for double to triple the price of the plans.
Moving to an alternative is just the normal course given these incentives, and that's what people did in droves (looking at Japan for instance)
Looks like you're thinking about key exchanges as opposed to phone number exchanges.
Ever heard of user nicknames?
Do not be sprouting on about things that you do not understand.
If you're worried about Signal's hosting provider seeing your device's IP address, use a proxy. Personally, I'm not, because there's no trivial way to go from "Here's some IP traffic" to "this human had a conversation with this human".
> See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=autoexec&next=394457...
I also hand BitWarden all my passwords. Therefore, the government has them, right?
(But it's broken somehow:
https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=autoexec&next=394457...
)
And yet many people seem to earnestly believe that a tiny token fee will be enough to deter spam, despite clear evidence to the contrary (see for instance how Twitter's "verification" fee has completely failed to stop bots from overrunning the platform, many of which proudly display their blue checks).
But sadly I don't have contacts either!