On its 10th anniversary, Signal’s president wants to remind you that the world’s most secure communications platform is a nonprofit. It’s free. It doesn’t track you or serve you ads. It pays its engineers very well. And it’s a go-to app for hundreds of millions of people.
My only gripe with signal, is the use of phone numbers as usernames. Not everyone with whom I want to communicate via signal has a phone number. I understand why they went this route, but wish there was an alternative way.
I’ve been using it for a while and by far the biggest issue is how giant the backup file is and now about 3Gb of data were lost because of a signal version mismatch between an old phone I was using and the new one I switched to.
You can use a username only for finding and adding friends, you only need the phone number to create an account. That’s probably because Signal started as an alternative to Messages (or whatever it was called back then), so you could send SMS if you wanted, or secure messages to friends w/ Signal. The whole point was to be a gentle transition from SMS to private messaging. However, they eventually dropped the SMS feature, but it seems they kept the phone number as username thing.
It kind of sucks, but I think that’s a reasonable limitation since the vast majority of people using this service will have a phone number. You could probably even sign up for a free trial of something (e.g. Google Fi) to sign up for Signal, set up the username, and then drop the phone number service. I don’t know if there are any problems with this, but I don’t think they do anything with your phone number after everything is set up.
Yeah. And I don’t fault them for this route. I just with I could sign up without a phone number. Maybe the username thing is a predecessor to allowing usernam-only registration in the future.
Yeah, hopefully. It would also be awesome to have a web login so I could access messages and whatnot when using someone else’s computer w/o having to install something.
I don’t know what direction they’re going, but I’m honestly okay with the caveats that currently exist.
Having web logon would mean they would need to hold the decryption key in some form (or have a weak decryption key, your credentials), so, while convenient, I think it would degrade security and possibly privacy. Unless you mean to receive new messages, the way the desktop app works?
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I can’t tell if you’re joking haha
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It creeps me the fuck out. I do not get why a service that bills itself as secure needs to know something that can be traced back to my credit card and name. I won’t use Telegram or Signal because of this.
The Signal pitch is that you don’t need identity security so long as the encryption is strong enough.
That is, incidentally, the same pitch Botcoiner make.