You wouldn’t concern yourself with the legality, if your threat vector includes the traceability of the phone number.

And regarding your (in this context) nonsensical privilege remark: I live in such a country. Yet I have used such numbers.

If somebody is that paranoid (or in a situation where that level of secrecy is necessary) they would not use a number that is traceable to them… So it doesn’t matter if they have your phone number or not.

Are you fucking kidding me?! What do they even gain from that?

Hardware great, software garbage. They really want to be like Apple but aren’t even half as competent (which is more an insult to Samsung than praise to Apple). It comes bloated with all kind of garbage alot of which you can’t uninstall (like Facebook). They have their own app store next to the Google Store which is annoying. It has no reason to be there other than distributing their shitty apps that I don’t want in the first place.

I currently have an S21 and can’t wait to have the spare income to replace it.

“Looks like you have a suicide scheduled at 10. Here are some tips I found on the internet!”

So you use Instagramm but are concerned that Threads collects too much data? Next you are going to tell me that you don’t use Facebook because you don’t trust the company behind it?