I remember a time when visiting a website that opens a javacript dialog box asking for your name so the message “hi <name entered>” could be displayed was baulked at.
Why does signal want a phone number to register? Is there a better alternative?
Privacy ≠ Anonymity ≠ Security
Because it’s centralized, I prefer SimpleX.
What an answers. Completely nonsense
I think it’s important to remember de difference between being private and being anonymous. Signal IS private. It’s not anonymous. The same is true for many other apps/services.
Personally I like to be private. I don’t really need to be anonymous.
Reduce spam bot accounts and other malware, as well as to allow for user discovery so you can find your contacts more easily. It’s not designed to be an anonymous service, just a private one.
It’s not designed to be an anonymous service, just a private one.
I think this needs to be said a lot more often and a lot louder. Anonymous and private are NOT necessarily the same thing, nor should the expectation be that they are. Both have a purpose.
The amount of trolls in this thread that either try to spew false information intentionally or just have no idea what they are talking about is insane.
If you are worried about what data (including your phone number) law enforcement can recieve (if they have your specific user ID, which is not equal to your phone number) from the Signal company check this: https://propertyofthepeople.org/document-detail/?doc-id=21114562 Tldr: It’s the date of registration and last time user was seen online. No other information, Signal just doesn’t have any other and this is by design.
If you want to know more about how they accomplish that feat you can check out the sealed sender feature: https://nerdschalk.com/what-is-sealed-sender-in-signal-and-should-you-enable-it/
or the private contact discovery system: https://signal.org/blog/private-contact-discovery/
Also as Signal only requires a valid phone number for registration you might try some of these methods (not sure if they still work): https://theintercept.com/2024/07/16/signal-app-privacy-phone-number/
This shows they do not need our phone numbers but they still demand it.
Despite this, escaping WhatsApp and Discord, anti-libre software, is more important.
No it doesn’t. What is a need? It is for troll and spam and bot protection. How does the links show that there is no need for it?
edit: it’s funny how people downvoting comments about signal’s sealed sender being a farce never even attempt to explain what its threat model is supposed to be. (meaning: what attacks, with which adversary capabilities specifically, is it designed to prevent?)
Downvoted as you let them bait you. Escaping WhatsApp and Discord, anti-libre software, is more important.
Downvoted as you let them bait you. Escaping WhatsApp and Discord, anti-libre software, is more important.
I don’t know what you mean by “bait” here, but…
Escaping to a phone-number-requiring, centralized-on-Amazon, closed-source-server-having, marketed-to-activists, built-with-funding-from-Radio-Free-Asia (for the specific purpose of being used by people opposing governments which the US considers adversaries) service which makes downright dishonest claims of having a cryptographically-ensured inability to collect metadata? No thanks.
(fuck whatsapp and discord too, of course.)
When it’s libre software, we’re not banned from fixing it.
SimpleX is better
Escaping WhatsApp and Discord, anti-libre software, is most important part.
When it’s libre software, we’re not banned from fixing it.
Signal is a company and a network service and a protocol and some libre software.
Anyone can modify the client software (though you can’t actually distribute modified versions via Apple’s iOS App Store, for reasons explained below) but if a 3rd party actually “fixed” the problems I’ve been talking about here then it really wouldn’t make any sense to call that Signal anymore because it would be a different (and incompatible) protocol.
Only Signal (the company) can approve of changes to Signal (the protocol and service).
Here is why forks of Signal for iOS, like most seemingly-GPLv3 software for iOS, cannot be distributed via the App Store
Apple does not distribute GPLv3-licensed binaries of iOS software. When they distribute binaries compiled from GPLv3-licensed source code, it is because they have received another license to distribute those binaries from the copyright holder(s).
The reason Apple does not distribute GPLv3-licensed binaries for iOS is because they cannot, because the way that iOS works inherently violates the “installation information” (aka anti-tivozation) clause of GPLv3: Apple requires users to agree to additional terms before they can run a modified version of a program, which is precisely what this clause of GPLv3 prohibits.
This is why, unlike the Android version of Signal, there are no forks of Signal for iOS.
The way to have the source code for an iOS program be GPLv3 licensed and actually be meaningfully forkable is to have a license exception like nextcloud/ios/COPYING.iOS. So far, at least, this allows Apple to distribute (non-GPLv3!) binaries of any future modified versions of the software which anyone might make. (Legal interpretations could change though, so, it is probably safer to pick a non-GPLv3 license if you’re starting a new iOS project and have a choice of licenses.)
Anyway, the reason Signal for iOS is GPLv3 and they do not do what NextCloud does here is because they only want to appear to be free/libre software - they do not actually want people to fork their software.
Only Signal (the company) is allowed to give Apple permission to distribute binaries to users. The rest of us have a GPLv3 license for the source code, but that does not let us distribute binaries to users via the distribution channel where nearly all iOS users get their software.
Yeah, iOS is not libre software.
it’s being answered in the github thread you linked. Sorry that this is not enough for you but it’s enough for most people: “For people who are concerned about this sort of thing, you can enable sealed sender indicators in the settings”
it’s being answered in the github thread you linked
The answers there are only about the fact that it can be turned off and that by default clients will silently fall back to “unsealed sender”.
That does not say anything about the question of what attacks it is actually meant to prevent (assuming a user does “enable sealed sender indicators”).
This can be separated into two different questions:
- For an adversary who does not control the server, does sealed sender prevent any attacks? (which?)
- For an adversary who does control the server, how does sealed sender prevent that adversary from identifying the sender (via the fact that they must identify themselves to receive messages, and do so from the same IP address)?
The strongest possibly-true statement i can imagine about sealed sender’s utility is something like this:
For users who enable sealed sender indicators AND who are connecting to the internet from the same IP address as some other Signal users, from the perspective of an an adversary who controls the server, sealed sender increases the size of the set of possible senders for a given message from one to the number of other Signal users who were online from behind the same NAT gateway at the time the message was sent.
This is a vastly weaker claim than saying that “by design” Signal has no possibility of collecting any information at all besides the famous “date of registration and last time user was seen online” which Signal proponents often tout.
Signal fills an incredibly important spot in a spectrum of privacy and usability where it’s extremely usable without sacrificing very much privacy. Sure, to the most concerned privacy enthusits it’s not the best, but it’s a hell of a lot easier to convince friends and family to use Signal than something like Matrix.
Offers the same privacy but is not centralised. it’s peer to peer
But like TOR, can entry / exit nodes be used to tie the two ends together through e.g. timing attacks?
Has any app fixed this?
I fogot it does that.
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Yes, and in that time you would visit a website with your own IP address likely, likely over HTTP without SSL/TLS, likely with your vulnerable browser fingerprint. Point?
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Privacy, not anonymity. Two completely different things.
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Because the way Signal is built hosting it requires a lot of resources (storage especially), so they want spam prevention and fewer accounts per person.
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I haven’t seen a non-TLS website in years.
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Your asserting “two completely different things” doesn’t make it true. Privacy and anonymity are not synonyms but they are overlapping areas. Also ISTM you are redefining terms to suit your purposes. Anonymity to me means the message recipient can’t tell who you are. If a THIRD PARTY (the server operator) can ALSO tell who you are, that’s a privacy failure, not just an anonymity one.
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Why does it take so much storage per user? Does it have video uploads or anything like that? A user account should basically just be a row in a database.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signal_(software) :
In August 2022, Signal notified 1900 users that their data had been affected by the Twilio breach including user phone numbers and SMS verification codes.[105] At least one journalist had his account re-registered to a device he did not control as a result of the attack.[106] …
This mandatory connection to a telephone number (a feature Signal shares with WhatsApp, KakaoTalk, and others) has been criticized as a “major issue” for privacy-conscious users who are not comfortable with giving out their private number.[142] A workaround is to use a secondary phone number.[142] The ability to choose a public, changeable username instead of sharing one’s phone number was a widely-requested feature.[142][144][145] This feature was added to the beta version of Signal in February 2024.[146]
Using phone numbers as identifiers may also create security risks that arise from the possibility of an attacker taking over a phone number.[142] A similar vulnerability was used to attack at least one user in August 2022, though the attack was performed via the provider of Signal’s SMS services, not any user’s provider.[105] The threat of this attack can be mitigated by enabling Signal’s Registration Lock feature, a form of two-factor authentication that requires the user to enter a PIN to register the phone number on a new device.[147]
They are overlapping areas, but they are “two completely different things”. They overlap by sharing common goals, not by being interchangeable.
Anonymity to me means the message recipient can’t tell who you are.
Right. And Signal doesn’t provide that at all, it ties your private messages to your identity (phone number), it explicitly does not provide anonymity. In fact, it proudly advertises you as a signal user to other signal users that have your number saved. It allows you to post public status updates, it encourages you to save your first and last name on your account.
If a THIRD PARTY (the server operator) can ALSO tell who you are, that’s a privacy failure, not just an anonymity one.
Okay? And? In this hypothetical world where Signal offered anonymity but still tied you to your number for other practical reasons, then you’re be correct that it would be a privacy concern.
But they don’t offer anonymity, they offer private conversations.
They are overlapping areas, but they are “two completely different things”. They overlap by sharing common goals, not by being interchangeable.
They aren’t interchangeable but they intersect. Completely different means they are disjoint.
it proudly advertises you as a signal user to other signal users
That sounds terrible, a private message service shouldn’t advertise anything to anyone. If I subscribe to a subversive magazine, it shouldn’t advertise me to other subscribers. It’s a terrible invasion if they do. Signal and PGP are both comparable to subversive magazines in that regard, even if the PGP manual tried to say the opposite.
I think most of us these days recognize that the whole concept of public key directories and signature chains on PGP keys was a conceptual error in how people thought about privacy back then (they only cared about encrypting message content). We like to think we know better now, but maybe we don’t.
Okay? And? In this hypothetical world where Signal offered anonymity but still tied you to your number for other practical reasons, then you’re be correct that it would be a privacy concern.
According to Wikipedia, they do record some of that info and report it to the government when required. In fact there is further disclosure to them (they might not retain or use the info, but they do receive it) every time you connect to the Signal server.
Anyway the Wikipedia article indicates they have introduced usernames as an alternative to phone numbers, so they have finally acknowledged the problem and done something about it.
- When people would complain about JS on webpages, they were not.
- Completely different things overlap all the time.
- Because your status updates and messages are encrypted and stored (until retrieved, of course) once for every recipient, and that includes your other devices and their other devices.
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Our phone numbers are not private from them.
Despite this, escaping WhatsApp and Discord, anti-libre software, is more important.
- yawn, vpns are a thing and strawman argument. point?
- my number is private. point?
- bs. spam is easy to detect across a large number of accounts using simpleheuristics. point?
- they were talking of something like year 2003, when they were commonly not.
- no, PSTN is not private.
- for something end-to-end encrypted, including message metadata (not connection metadata), this statement seems amazingly stupid ; “simple heuristics” are usually used on something like plaintext e-mail.
- no they weren’t. no moving of goalposts
- what’s my number then?
- amazingly not stupid. dunning kruger and all that.
- People were complaining about JS existing when SSL and TLS were not omniscious. If we disagree on that fact, move on.
- A sequence of digits.
- OK, what are your “simple heuristics” for a bunch of pieces of ciphertext with unknown sender (except for IP addresses) in your storage to pick spammers from that?
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Privacy ≠ anonymity
Our phone numbers are not private from them.
Despite this, escaping WhatsApp and Discord, anti-libre software, is more important.
It’s libre software. Go host the server and change the clients to connect to your custom server and distribute to the users you need.
How? i wanted to do that but the client doesn’t let you use another server? Host file ?
Agreed, escaping WhatsApp and Discord is the most important part.
Are you saying I have to literally rebuild and distribute my own client APK if I want to use my own server? There’s no “settings” in the existing client where you say what server you want to use, like every email client has? That sounds obnoxious.
If you don’t trust Signal to run an unmodified server without malicious modifications, then why would you trust their build of the APK?
To truly be safe from Signal’s influence you would need to audit the source code and build it yourself.
Personally I have no problem using Signal’s servers
To truly be safe from Signal’s influence you would need to audit the source code and build it yourself.
Usually I only install APK’s from F-Droid, which always builds its apps from source, rather than using the developer’s APK. I’m uncomfortable that Signal doesn’t seem to be on F-droid, and I’m in fact hesitant to install it from anywhere else. I’m not currently set up to build Android apps myself. I’m a fairly unsophisticated Android user.
Signal on Android has had reproducible builds for years now.
Sources: Github Readme, Official blog post
Thanks. I’m not a sophisticated Android user and so far have just stayed with installing stuff from F-droid. If the official build matches the F-droid build, that’s great. At some point I want to spend some time bringing up Android build tools, but I have too much other stuff going on right now.
I just checked and I installed Signal from F-Droid.
It says Repository: Guardian Project on the app page.
Interesting, I wonder why it’s not in the main F-droid repo. Thanks.
You can use Obtainium and get it straight from Github.
edit: nvm i re-read what you wrote
i agree it does mostly fulfill the criteria for libre software. perhaps not in every way to the same spirit as other projects, but that is indeed a separate discussion.
h̶o̶w̶ ̶m̶a̶n̶y̶ ̶c̶o̶m̶m̶u̶n̶i̶t̶i̶e̶s̶ ̶a̶r̶e̶ ̶d̶o̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶t̶h̶a̶t̶ ̶r̶i̶g̶h̶t̶ ̶n̶o̶w̶?̶ ̶i̶ ̶s̶u̶s̶p̶e̶c̶t̶ ̶y̶o̶u̶ ̶m̶a̶y̶ ̶b̶e̶ ̶d̶r̶a̶s̶t̶i̶c̶a̶l̶l̶y̶ ̶u̶n̶d̶e̶r̶s̶t̶a̶t̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶b̶a̶r̶r̶i̶e̶r̶s̶ ̶f̶o̶r̶ ̶t̶h̶a̶t̶.̶ ̶b̶u̶t̶ ̶w̶o̶u̶l̶d̶ ̶b̶e̶ ̶d̶e̶l̶i̶g̶h̶t̶e̶d̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶b̶e̶ ̶p̶r̶o̶v̶e̶n̶ ̶w̶r̶o̶n̶g̶.̶.̶.̶
The barrier is that only you and your friends would be using that Fignal or Xignal or whatever home installation, and for that practically, for ease of use, it’s simpler to host Matrix which even a complete idiot can do.
You could change it to use multiple servers but changing app is faster.
So, escaping WhatsApp and Discord, anti-libre software, is the most important part.
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Because they’re building a private, not anonymous, instant messenger. They’ve been very open about this.
Our phone numbers are not private from them.
Despite this, escaping WhatsApp and Discord, anti-libre software, is more important.
Nothing “derailing” us. Not everyone has the same threat model. The messages are private and that’s what’s most important. Signal can only provide phone number and last connection time to the feds. If that’s too much information for you, then you’re not the target group and have a different threat model.
The messages are private and that’s what’s most important.
No, that isn’t true. WhatsApp has the same lies. Law enforcement connect communication between users at key times and use it as credible evidence. Why would drug exporter 1 be communicating with drug buyer 1 at the exact time the delivery arrives in the country? Law enforcement doesn’t need to know what was written.
What are you talking about? Are you saying sealed sender is a lie? If so, I want some proof.
They are referring to message metadata.
Even if they don’t show the content of messages, if they can show that phone number A is sending messages and getting replies to number B then that’s all the government needs.
For the purpose of operating our Services, you agree to our data practices as described in our Privacy Policy, as well as the transfer of your encrypted information and metadata to the United States and other countries where we have or use facilities, service providers or partners.
They store metadata, which is distinct from encrypted data.
Are you saying sealed sender is a lie?
https://signal.org/blog/sealed-sender/
When you send a traditional piece of physical mail, the outside of the package typically includes the address of both the sender and the recipient. The same basic components are present in a Signal message. The service can’t “see into” the encrypted package contents, but it uses the information written on the outside of the package to facilitate asynchronous message delivery between users.
They have a list of encrypted messages, who it’s from and who it’s to, based upon the sealed sender description. If you are using phone numbers then you are not anonymous, and a TLA agency can search known bad numbers even if Signal does not try to build that graph.
The ONLY data Signal stores about you is your phone number, most recent registration time/date and most recent login time/date. They don’t know who you’re messaging or when you’re messaging them AFAIK.
You can see this for yourself at signal.org/bigbrother
in the end of the day, the end user needs an id. this is perfect for the everyday user, but obviously if you are writing anti regime articles, you might want to look around for more anonim apps.
We have to assume we are all writing anti regime articles … In the future
perfect for the everyday user
…because of course, they don’t need privacy, do they now. “Nothing to hide” and all that jazz.
as I see it, Signal tried to fit that privacy gap for a standard centralised messenger, if you think about it, that might have made it easier to non-tech-savvy people to adopt it (even if it was as a request from a contact), decentralisation is not remotely appealing to them
Wrong, they care what it does, not how it works.
SimpleX
I hope it gets multi device support and sync one day, in a way that just works
You can just make a group for each contact with all of your (and their) devices in it.
It’s still a shitty workaround
If people contact me, I can’t expect them to create a group…
You can configure one or more of your profiles’ addresses to be a “business address” which means that when people contact you via it it will always create a new group automatically. Then you can (optionally, on a per-contact basis) add your other devices’ profiles to it (as can your contact with their other devices, after you make them an admin of the group).
It’s not the most obvious/intuitive system but it works well and imo this paradigm is actually better than most systems’ multi-device support in that you can see which device someone is sending from and you can choose to give different contacts access to a different subset of your devices than others.
And it uses same tech as Signal.
However getting friends to join Simplex is complicated by two annoyances:
(1) It gets confused by an invite URL coming from facebook (it doesn’t know to strip the appended Facebook tracking code - as trivial as it is).
(2) When the invite is via a QR code you must scan it with SimpleX not your native camera app. Invitees just give up.
Isn’t the QR Code a link you could also open in a web browser?
Spam prevention
And discovery.
It’s not an argument. Think about regular mobile numbers, are they preventing spams? No.
Are you seeing spam on signal? Do you even know why spam is possible on phone networks and what the difference is between phone networks and the internet?
Because Signal has a low user base. Why Spam on Signal, if you can reach everyone with an SMS?
I don’t know what is spam for you, but when you get three message requests from three girls respectively named Tania, Clara and Ella that are contacting you about you carrier or your management skills, I call it spam.
The way that Signal integrates phone number is odd because it opens up the spam door. O understand why Signal use phone numbers this way (to make “normies” adopt Signal more easily like WhatsApp would do) but it not the best to kind of contaminate the network with the traditional cell network
What kind of spam are you talking about
Scams, girls wanting to chat with you, incredible money opportunities…
I misread the comment you replied to originally (thought they were referring to bot spam prevention)… Signal doesn’t work like the phone network, you can’t necessarily just “call” or “text” a random person. There’s also additional verification before you can send messages sometimes.
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Bots. If it makes you feel better, you can disable other people finding you via phone number and just give them your username. All messages are private.
But the police request the meta data of all messages from your phone number that the company has and they’re required by law to give them it.
You should go properly read the requests from law enforcement they have received and exactly what information it contains. It’s public. Then evaluate if it matters for yur threat model. Security doesn’t exist in a vaccum.
These are all the court orders Signal has complied to and details all the information they give up
https://signal.org/bigbrother/
TLDR; they only give the last time the account connected to Signal servers and the time of account registration or re-registration
They can “request” it all day long. Signal doesn’t store them beyond the time needed to deliver to the end user device, and while (temporarily) stored, it’s encrypted in a way Signal’s service cannot read.
huh? so the phone number is encrypted in a way that can’t be read, but an sms is sent to the phone? … a separate company sends the text on behalf of signal? so that separate company logs the phone number, the timestamp and who knows what else.
Signal doesn’t use SMS anymore, and all messages are sent over encrypted Internet protocol. Any servers in between won’t see the phone number, it’s not needed to deliver the message, it’s using an IP address at that point and the entire message metadata is encrypted. Signal is the only one that can see the phone numbers, which they use to identify multiple clients as a single user and route messages accordingly.
Signal doesn’t use SMS at all, once you have enrolled. The phone number is used to validate people and exclude bots, during registration. As others have noted, you can hide your number from other users, as well.
What are you on about right now? I don’t mean that sarcastically, I really am wondering what your concern is. Are you concerned that because your phone number is associated with Signal that police will know you use Signal?
The phone carrier at least here in the US is required to store the call data for 18 months, according to the one that I use.
What does that have to do with Signal?
The claim is that Signal’s phone verification step doesn’t cause privacy problems because Signal (purportedly) doesn’t retain the phone numbers after verification. That claim is falsified because the phone carrier stores the call record even if Signal doesn’t. They store it because of the same law that makes them turn it over to Big Brother on demand. The phone verification step is, therefore, a privacy problem. Obviously there are similar issues with IP routing, but at least I can use a VPN with an endpoint in another country.
No, that wasn’t the claim. Phone numbers are used for sign up, but the post’s OP was talking about messaging meta data. Messaging meta data doesn’t go through your carrier and is encrypted.
If you check the publication of signal’s cases where they had to hand out data, and in reverse the FBI leak that listed analysis of all messenger apps by what data they were able to acquire in most cases, Signal came out as one of the top options.
Oh I see what you mean. But a big enough data dump from the phone carriers identifies all of Signal’s users, not good.
The “record” is a SMS verification code. All that will tell the government is that you registered for Signal, nothing else.
Telling the govt that you registered for Signal sounds like a bad failure as far as I’m concerned, e.g. if you are a user in a repressive regime. Do you think Trump would like to get his hands on a list of all the Signal users in the US? Probably yes. What would he do with the list? IDK but it has to be bad. So it should be an objective of Signal to make it impossible for anyone to create such a list.
Anyway, it sounds like Signal has wised up and is getting rid of the phone number requirement. I don’t understand why people here keep defending the misfeature. I’ve heard such things explained as “system justification” but I still don’t understand it. All of us make poor decisions all the time, but we should at least make some effort to recognize them, and fix them when possible.
Secret sender stops any real amount of information about messages being connected to you
Its encrypted
Messages are e2e encrypted. Metadata is not encrypted.
Edit: I feel the need to qualify this statement. Metadata about your connection may be encrypted at rest but is decryptable given that signal is released metadata to authorities with a warrant/subpoena.
People told you a few times to go look for yourself what Signal can give away. Its protocol descriptions are pretty understandable.
The whole bloody reason it’s always recommended is because it’s absolutely the best thing in terms of yes, encrypting metadata. It’s state of the art, level above that bullshit you’re thinking.
Unfortunately, that also means that hosting it takes lots of resources, which means they have to screen bots and mults somehow. Phone numbers are one way. Paid accounts are another.
Phone numbers are one way. Paid accounts are another.
Rubbish. How would this stop bots? Bots are created to make money. What makes you think creators don’t have a phone number, or be prepared to pay to spam.
Phone numbers cost money, which means they’re not easy to create in bulk, and therefore banning or blocking spam numbers is much easier than if it was open sign up.
One account per phone number versus infinity of accounts without.
signal accounts… signal accounts everywhere!
Yes it is. Signal isnt PGP email. A lot of work went into protecting metadata.
what? can you show a source? I think you mixed it up with Matrix
