Yeah lets use the phone number of a middle man to sign up…sure u wont forget to relock the number every week so they dont get the power for account take over since they manage your number.

“Account recovery”, yeah but by whom?

“Find contacts”, dont you know who u wana talk with?

“be found by other people” ???

nitpicking

i rather talk to my grand parents over ham radio than giving them a smartphone

Pragmatism got us here. Maybe its time for people to start giving fucks, or like just dont communicate with me.

Well in many nation you can only get a phone number by showing ID, hence the number itself isnt anonymized. So if there is a legal request to signal they hand over the number and u already de anonymized. If you dont use your own number you have to relock signal every week (manual) so the number cant be used for account takeover…why is that lock even on a timer? That just sounds like a trap.

But lets assume u used your own number, and it gets found out. With that number it would be easy af for a state actor to send u a zero day SMS to take over your phone…there are so many reasons why a phone number is just bad to use as a identifier in a privacy focused app. The technical hurdles to allow account creation without phone number or like just to have number as optional, are very low. The official reason for the numbers is spam protection…but there are a lot of privacy messengers out there that dont use numbers and dont have a spam problem.

thats just theatrics at this point. they are already in

Replacing one phone number based system with another may not be a wise choise.

Fuck signal. No “privacy” focused messenger should need a phone number to register…at that point u basically handing the agencys meta data on a platter