It seems useless to me, at least regarding the cybersecurity aspect. Of course, it’s helpful when people ask for my contact information, and I don’t want to share my phone number or email address.
But they still require information that could be used to prove or be linked to my identity for registration, right? This means a hacker could still reveal your IP address, phone number, email, and your passcode. Likewise, the development team can access these as well.
I know I’m overly cautious about my privacy, but that’s just how I am.
So if I claim fubo as a username on Signal, that means what? Nobody else can use that username? If so, it’s another global namespace, same as Twitter; ten or twenty years in the future, someone’s gonna want to be reclaiming disused usernames.
(What if I want to be fubo to some people, and MissCatPictures to other people? Can I do that from one phone? One phone number?)
In the current Staging implementation, you pick a username (which you can change), and the app picks a two-digit suffix to your username.
Oh, so can I keep trying until I get to be fub? Nice.
(I am a heavy Signal user; it’s my primary messaging service for people I know IRL. It’s where I post cute pictures of my housemates’ cats. I really want the Signal folks to get stuff right and not mess it up.)
What if I want to be
fuboto some people, andMissCatPicturesto other people?
Use SimpleX
I meant only to address what I specifically quoted. The feature of using multiple identities, separately for each contact, is baked right into SimpleX and works amazingly well.
All the personal information you mentioned should be hashed or encrypted. For any given phone number, see how little information they have: just an account creation timestamp and a last access timestamp.
There’s so much FUD about Signal it’s ridiculous. I’m starting to believe those glowie memes are true it’s just the “lol like I’d ever trust Signal!!!” folks who I think might be the glowies. 🫣🫣🫣
spoiler
(No I don’t actually believe they’re glowies lol).
My main complaint is that they officially prohibit 3rd party clients including 3rd party builds of their official ones. They also don’t have reproducible builds for their clients. It leaves the door wide open for inserting some telemetry via an update to completely bypass their otherwise good encryption and (lack of) data retention.
Would allowing third parties access to their server API just cause spammers to flood signal users.
It’s disappointing, I wanted to have desktop signal without depending on an application in another device.
Seems I’m in the minority but having to use my phone number as identier is exactly why I don’t use apps like this, including WhatsApp. I don’t care if my username gets shared, but I do not want my phone number to be shared with a bunch of randoms.
Would you be more likely to use Signal if the username tests become mainstream? Then you wouldn’t need to share your phone # with everyone.
I remember when Signal used to be a drop-in replacement for SMS. It used phone numbers so you could automatically upgrade to secure messaging if your recipient also had Signal, and just use regular SMS otherwise.
