https://signal.org/blog/phone-number-privacy-usernames/
https://signal.org/blog/sealed-sender/
https://signal.org/blog/private-contact-discovery/
https://signal.org/blog/phone-number-privacy-usernames/
https://signal.org/blog/sealed-sender/
https://signal.org/blog/private-contact-discovery/
And re: defaults the default behavior on signal is that your phone number is hidden from other users but it can be used to do contact discovery. Notably though you can turn contact discovery off (albeit few people do).
There isn't really anything you can do with that information. The first value is already accessible via other methods (since the phone companies carry those records and will comply with warrants). And for pretty much anyone with signal installed that second value is going to essentially always be the day the search occurred.
And like another user mentioned, the most recent of those warrants is from the day before they moved to username based identification so it is unclear whether the same amount of data is still extractable.
Ironically enough Reddit seems to have a pretty good take on this: https://www.reddit.com/r/law/comments/1qogc2g/comment/o21aeh...
I was genuinely surprised when I went to Reddit and saw that as the most voted comment on the story.
The lookups go through a secure enclave, the system is architected to limit the number of lookups that can be done, and the system has some fairly extensive anti-exfiltration cryptographic fuckery running inside the secure enclave to further limit the extent to which accounts can be efficiently looked up.
And of course you can also remove your phone number from contact discovery (but not from the acct entirely) but I'm not sure how that interacts with lookup for subpoenas. If they use the same system that contact discovery uses, it may be an undocumented way to exclude your account from subpoena responses.
The rest of what they say however is pretty spot on. The priority for signal is privacy, not anonymity. They try to optimise anonymity when they can but they do give up a little anonymity in exchange for anti-spam and user-friendliness.
So of course the ending notes of "use a VPN, configure the settings to maximise anonymity, and maybe even get a secondary phone number to use with it" are all perfectly reasonable suggestions.
>We have also worked to ensure that keeping your phone number private from the people you speak with doesn’t necessitate giving more personal information to Signal. Your username is not stored in plaintext, meaning that Signal cannot easily see or produce the usernames of given accounts.
Extremely non trivial. What I'm hearing is "security by obfuscation".