This post would fit better in the ~privacy territory but it's too expensive to post there. @davidw, please consider lowering the fee ðŸ¤
Yes, you can use Signal without sharing your personal phone number. Here’s how I did it.
THE MESSAGING APP Signal is described by security professionals as utilizing the gold standard of cryptography. Unlike many competitors, its default is end-to-end encryption — and on top of that, the app minimizes the amount of information it stores about users. This makes it a powerful communication tool for those seeking a private and secure means of chatting, whether it’s journalists and their sources, activists and human rights defenders, or just ordinary people who want to evade the rampant data-mining of Big Tech platforms.
Signal continues to introduce privacy-enhancing features such as usernames that can be used in lieu of phone numbers to chat with others — preventing others from finding you by searching for your phone number. But the app still requires users to provide a working phone number to be able to sign up in the first place.
For privacy-conscious individuals, this can be a problem.
...read more at theintercept.com
Very nice!!
Although you must still connect to their proprietary servers, complete regular google captchas, and share your network graph and other metadata
simplex is still miles ahead
useful article though, didn't know about the registration lock feature
Yup. Simplex is the shit but its adoption is very poor. It’s really hard for me to convince people to use another service after I brought them to Signal long time before.
Yes, the 3-letter agencies figured out a long time ago that with a sufficient network-graph, you actually don't really need to read content 75% of the time.
Assume you know Bill sells pizzas, you can accurately theorize that all those calls coming in at 4-9pm are customers ordering pizzas.....its often enough to just know that.
Thanks! Signal is one of those apps government in India had blocked in last 2 years. I can't use it.
I don’t think that they blocked Signal.
14 others last year, but not signal. You can also get the apk for android.
WhatsApp and Signal are both generally available in India as far as I was aware.
They have banned more than 14. Yes, the first bunch banned 14 for sure. Signal was banned but again reinstated because they became ready to to be compliant
Source
But indians may install briar from github or fdroid, right?
BRIAR is excellent, it can be downloaded from F-droid, I've been using it recently, trying to find a really private and encrypted application for my messaging. the largest number of opinions and reviews were for "Threema" but before paying. Look for an open source and free-to-use solution.
The top options that I found in my opinion would be these: Threema.
BRIAR.
SimpleX.
Session.
Signal.
This is awesome. I have been wondering about this. Time to make a new account. Thank you.
It's much easier using SimpleX
IMHO it’s not. It’s much better but also a lot more complicated to use.
It's not, share your link to your chat and done
Step 2 is locate a pay phone that can receive calls
This is not easy today as many pay phones have been retired.
I never used it. I will try it today