Mastodawn

Signal Mar 19, 2025

"We have ceded so many of the core operations of our lives and institutions to tech, we must recognise that strong encryption isn’t the enemy of security — it *is* security." - Signal President
@Mer__edith for the Financial Times on the war on encryption

https://www.ft.com/content/a934150f-e0f5-4e75-a2d1-a3671ea52ca0

The war on encryption is dangerous

Government demands to access encrypted data via back doors will leave it vulnerable to hacks, breaches and theft

Financial Times

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zaire the bored genderfuck Mar 19, 2025

@signalapp i'm going to be a replyenby here for a sec

you do realize anonymity is a friend of security, and you're actively sabotaging your users' anonymity with your hard phone & phone number requirement?

you've built a great app but that choice of basing your account system on phone numbers makes it nonviable for the sensitive activities encryption is most nessesary for

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unexpectedteapot

@soop hello, I am a person from a Middle Eastern oppressive hellhole that executes and jails any political dissent online. So I know exactly how important it is to maintain privacy.
I think requiring the phone number for registration is an acceptable compromise that does not affect most people on the planet. Especially after rolling out different ways to connect such as links/QR codes and/or usernames, it became very viable to use under a high threat model. There is more to Signal that could clarify my position as well: https://signal.org/blog/private-contact-discovery/, https://signal.org/blog/sealed-sender/, https://signal.org/blog/signal-private-group-system/ among more.
Case on point? Compare Signal with SimpleX. The tradeoffs are clear.

Technology preview: Private contact discovery for Signal

At Signal, we’ve been thinking about the difficulty of private contact discovery for a long time. We’ve been working on strategies to improve our current design, and today we’ve published a new private contact discovery service. Using this service, Signal clients will be able to efficiently and s...

Signal Messenger