YES! The one main hurdle I’ve found (and the constant “share your contacts??” prompting). Good luck to them!
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Because my contacts are none of their business, and it’s fucking disgusting to even ask without the user going way out of their way to initiate it.
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There isn’t a single service on the planet who I would trust to allow their app to see my contacts.
The app asking for the permission is not acceptable. The permission should not exist at all. Both mobile OS should only be permitting users to explicitly import contacts that they choose, with literally no way for any app to see the master list in any context.
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The mere existence of the permission is obscene.
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Why not? Uh, No. That’s why. Not now, not the 100th time, not ever. I want it to stop asking. No.
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Now if only my people I knew used signal instead of WhatsApp 🤦♀️
Yea they will only move if WhatsApp fucks something badly.
they’re planning on adding ads
Imagine having to send people your username instead of them just installing Signal and knowing you’re there.
Nice! Maybe this will also pave the way for multiple accounts on the same device if you have two separate phone numbers for private and work.
Or just use SimpleX (same encryption tech as Signal anyhow).
Hopefully without the toxic devs?
What do you mean?
About time! Hopefully they will find ways to reduce spam though.
Never had a spam message
I imagine unrestricted usernames would make spam easier than with phone numbers. I’m just hoping they have a way to control this.
You still need a phone number to sign up, so there shouldn’t be any increase in spam
SimpleX has no phone number but I get no spam because only people I send a one-time invite code to can contact me. There is no directory of usernames.
Makes sense!
they’re going with numbers along with usernames, kinda like discord to reduce spam. I hope they work.
Where are you receiving these spam messages from? Random numbers aimed at marketing or what?
Sorry I misframed it. I mean that since there’s no need to reveal phone numbers, there could be an opportunity for spammers to increase spam by creating many accounts, and Signal should preemptively find ways where such spams could be reduced. However, I realized after posting that the article says we still need to sign up to signal with a phone number. However, there’s still the risk of impersonation (by writing someones username with tiny changes) and people trying to add vulnerable users by username (which they might be using on other platforms) instead of phone number.
Probably possible yeah, but if the account gets flagged after users reporting it, they’ll need to get a new number afterwards, which isn’t that easy (at least where I live).
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2 hours later… Or years
🤖 I’m a bot that provides automatic summaries for articles:
Click here to see the summary
Signal is publicly testing letting users add usernames to their accounts so they don’t have to share their phone number to connect via the encrypted messaging service.
The test was announced via a post on the Signal forums by VP of engineering Jim O’Leary, who referred to the feature as “pre-beta” and warned that there’ll be rough edges including crashes and broken push notifications.
Although accounts will still be associated with a traditional mobile number at setup, the username feature means you’ll be able to connect with and message other users without having to share what can be an important personally identifiable piece of information.
PCMag points to a note in the service’s wiki mentioning that signs of the feature cropped up as early as 2019, and Whittaker has been open about the Signal’s plans for it.
There are indicators that competitor WhatsApp is working on a similar feature, though the Meta-owned messaging service is typically less open about its future development plans.
But the ease of installing these test clients varies, and you’ll only be able to talk to other users running similar pre-release software.
Saved 50% of original text.
…so you can avoid sharing your phone number with your contacts.
they are not planning to let you use Signal without having a phone number and sharing it with their (Amazon’s) servers.
How come the only people I ever meet that use these weird messaging apps are drug dealers and immigrants? 99% of people I meet use Snapchat or Facebook Messenger to talk to people if not SMS, only time I hear about Whatsapp IRL it’s the sketchiest people.
While I’m on the subject, is the person who designs the Snapchat user interface from this planet? Do they have severe mental deficiencies? It’s really the worst UI of any app or program I’ve ever experienced.
Let me guess American? In Europe basically everyone uses Whatsapp, lots of people use Telegram some use signal. I use all of them.
Yep, you are correct.
Yeah when I got my first smartphone and whatsapp wasn’t around yet I had to pay like 10 or 15 cents per sms. So when WhatsApp became an option everybody and their mother jumped ship and joined. For a while sending an sms and getting back I’m on WhatsApp was a thing.
Nowadays I think sms is basically part of your plan an for most plans unlimited. But they milked it way too hard back in the day. So most people just don’t use it at all.
Wild but now things make a lot more sense, I’ve had unlimited texts for the majority of the time I’ve had a cellphone.
My Girlfriend and I use signal. We don’t talk to anyone else on there. She says it’s simply because she likes how it looks. 🤣
More spam messages then, ok…
While Signal did justify the need for numbers by cutting spam prevention I don’t get it…
Spammers use fake phone numbers all the time on the regular phone service so why not on Signal? A few steps too many for them to bother registering?
A few possible answers:
- Signal is not big enough for spammers to spend resources on
- People who bothered to use Signal are likely to be more privacy minded and therefore less likely to fall for scam
- Signal just isn’t as private as its marketing wants you to think it is
A tip (but you do you, of course), use something federated (XMPP!): the time for trusting a central organization to do no harm is over if you have kept tabs of anything internet over the last 40 years or so…
Spammers use fake phone numbers all the time on the regular phone service
The phone calls just use fake caller ID. Caller ID is entirely unauthenticated and the recipient just blindly trusts the sender, so scammers use sketchy VoIP services that let you override the caller ID without actually proving you own that number. Work is being done to improve this: https://www.fcc.gov/call-authentication
That’s means it’s trivial to use a fake number for outgoing calls, but the spammers can’t actually receive incoming calls or texts to those numbers.
You still need phone number verification to create an account, that hasn’t changed
So on the privacy front nothing has either. Good to know.
Weirdly, I got a spam message yesterday on Signal. No number - just a username.
I’m on the regular production version - not the one testing usernames.
