this post was submitted on 12 Dec 2025
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Privacy
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You do need a phone number to signup to Signal but you don't need to share it with anyone. Just create a new username for each new person you want to add.
That still means all your chats are identifiable to your phone number.
For an org that claims they're interested in privacy, that's a major contradiction.
"Major contradiction" how? It's simply admitting a limitation in their reality and working around it. It's pretty reduced from what it used to be, that would be that the phone number would be known to all chat participants. Do consider that it took some guy spending years in jail to learn enough of the telecom system that he might (not even "will", but "might") be able to spin up his own mobilecom that only requires a ZIP code to sign up.
Signal is not 100% perfect, they're barely reaching 98% perfect, but. Fantastical (fanatical) absolutism in goals helps no one make step progress.
You both make good points but I have to agree that having to give them my phone number and knowing all my data is correlated with that is an issue for the privacy-oriented user (ie. their target userbase)
What data? The only thing they know is when the account was created and when was the last access.
Yeah, it's a data point it'd be useful not to have to count on. But, then again, it's only the one. And it mostly serves as a data point only, not as an entry point. It's not possible to (normally) access anywhjere near all that data — in particular, the chats — primarily via the phone number, so in as much as it's about privacy, privacy is preserved (note however: not increased). Signal's intended use is for privacy, not anonymity.