Kinda of a poor write up. I have my issues with this but signal doesn't really use phone numbers internally, it uses hashes of phone numbers. It's not as straight forward as this article makes it seem, and this is readily available information that the author could have found.
this post was submitted on 23 Nov 2025
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Hashing doesn't really do anything because there are too few possible phone numbers. Easy to bruteforce. See the researchers who enumerated the WhatsApp users database recently via the internet...
Hold up. They also have profile pictures and other stuff. So Meta offered the option to create a global phone book, but also to create a phone book of children worldwide + a timeline of profile pictures. Meta's statement was that it wasn't a big deal because it was public data... So Meta's pedos dream phone book is something else entirely.
In addition to that, in most European countries you have to register with your ID in oder to get a mobile phone number. So its provably end-to-end related to your identity.
I prefer apps that require no phone number. Like Threema, SimpleX, Session, Status, XMPP, or Tox.
The main advantage of Signal was the SMS integration, which meant you no longer had to use the SMS app itself. In addition, SMS messages were displayed like a chat. That's why it needed to be linked to your cell phone number, but since they're no longer allowed to offer that anyway, they could have done a clean sweep of existing accounts and adapted the entire login process.
My vague memory is that Signal doesn't keep that information, so it couldn't be subpeona'd, indeed they've been asked for it before and declined to share.
BUT IT'S MOOT IF YOUR MESSAGES ARE VIEWED by sender or receiver ON ANDROID, WINDOWS OR IOS. Those operating systems can just view everything you type regardless.
How does signal match your contacts based on their phone number then?
by having you trust intel instead of themselves: https://signal.org/blog/private-contact-discovery/
Oh but that's still better than I expected.
Hence "vague memory". I don't know.
Should've known this was going to be an ad for SimpleX. They have a hard-on for anti-Signal content. It's nearly as laughable as GrapheneOS's hate for anything not GrapheneOS.
SimpleX is good tho.
Sure, if you like Nazis
Sorry what?
I would hope so. It's facilitating us talking; it kinda has to know who I am trying to talk to.
Well use some p2p messenger with tox protocoll