taxet@ekis @juliank true you need a phone number to create an account, I’ll give you that much. Though Signal has been subpoenaed for user data multiple times already and every time they’ve responded with “sorry, we don’t have that data, but here’s what we have” and given only account creation time and last connected date. If they had any other data they would have had to share that as well. They share the government requests here: https://signal.org/bigbrother/
@ekis @juliank it’s extremely unlikely that Signal would be able to choose not share the data in the request if they had it and still continue operate as it does. That would be such a huge thing that it would’ve already caused a bigger commotion.
Now if you take issue with Signal knowing your number at all, that’s a different discussion and I might be inclined to agree with you that there are cases where that alone could be a risk, but claiming they collect or share metadata requires proof.