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Comment by tivert | Hacker News Reader

> ... but then Signal wouldn't have your phone number either. What they need it for is ... dubious if you ask me.

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.

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Yeah, privacy is weird and cringe! Let's call 'em "privacy-bros" or maybe "encryption-bros" to signify that they are low status (I don't want to be like them, ew!)

If you need privacy without usability just exchange pubkeys with your friends?

I think the remark is more about these sort of rhetorical tactics which permeate every topic. It is a fair remark.

> I think the remark is more about these sort of rhetorical tactics which permeate every topic. It is a fair remark.

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.

Both his and your comments come off as inflammatory derailment to me. That's how it reads, I'm not ascribing malintent. People didn't use to talk like this, I hope you reconsider.

"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.

I try to figure out another shorthand which communicates as effectively. "Privacy minded geeks with a deep understanding of E2E encryption"?

The main selling point of Signal is privacy. That's basically the only reason it exists - without it, why not just use WhatsApp, Messenger, Snapchat, etc?

What is the usability concern for no longer needing a phone number?

> Using phone numbers allows for the kind of user discovery that most people expect in 2024

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.

> Do people really expect to still exchange phone numbers

Yes. This is the norm in the US.

And everywhere else on earth.

Not really, for better or worse.

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)

In how many countries do people not exchange phone numbers as the primary means of contact?

Hmm... North Korea? Sealand?

But then it's not private. It's linked to your phone number.

You can now hide you phone number, according to the blog post.

[...] 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.

I can only hide my phone number from other people, and even for that it should have been hidden by default from the start.

Can't hide it from some thought police which may or may not need a court order.

But it’s irrelevant, as the chats are end to end encrypted regardless. So sure, they’d know you had a Signal account, but not the contents thereof.

Well, to link with recent news, do you think talking with the late Alexey Navalni over Signal would protect you from russian police? They'd still be able to see that you talked to him.

And then what's the point of the super duper encryption?

In Signal, probably no. Signal has this sealed sender functionality hiding significant amount of metadata from passive observer and active examination post-communication: https://signal.org/blog/sealed-sender/

What Russian police would be able to see, that in a given time period of certificate rotation at most X people communicated to Navalny.

> They'd still be able to see that you talked to him.

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.

> 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...

Signal does not know who you correspond with. The only information they keep is the account creation timestamp, and the date that the account last connected to the Signal service.

You may have confused this information with WhatsApp which indeed keeps a lot of metadata on each user.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39414322

Well, TIL. That does not refute my comment, though. Signal still does not know who you chat with. It's the cloud provider who might log the IP address of the sender. Identifying the person based on that information alone would be non-trivial if not simply impossible.

> Signal still does not know who you chat with. It's the cloud provider

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.

Signal absolutely knows who you correspond with. How could they otherwise route your chat messages?

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.

I guess you are right. It's trust-based. For an actual obfuscation Signal would need to implement something like onion routing, right? I think Session does it.

That is not true. That is now how Signal works.

Unsure why the downvotes, but I assume it’s from this misunderstanding of the Signal protocol.

It's not irrelevant, but the exposure is reduced.

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.

Even encrypted data is not irrelevant. The frequency of messages is relevant, as is how many messages are sent how quickly, the total package size can be revealing if they arent hella padding the data, there is a lot you can learn just from the data. Total obfuscation is ideal.

If you are worried of an adversary that is using numerical analysis on the frequency of messages to somehow undermine you, I’d recommend not using a smartphone or internet connected device. And perhaps medication.

Good to hear that you have nothing to hide, comrade.

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?

>And perhaps medication

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.

Luckily there are other messaging services that are private if you’re going to be that pedantic about it.

But none will be as private as Signal.

Matrix is more private, depending on your threat model.

>and requiring them inserts a barrier to mass account creation that can keep spam accounts

Well, an even better barrier to reduce spam would be Signal to require some official ID of people...

But that's also a barrier to actual users, which would be counter-productive.

> not just weird privacy geeks who never gave up on PGP

Looks like you're thinking about key exchanges as opposed to phone number exchanges.

Ever heard of user nicknames?

I mean, a phone number is an arbtrary sequence of digits. I'm very happy to use a chat app where I say to someone 'what's your username?'.

I'm not giving a chat app free access to all my contacts - and that includes things like Whatsapp

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