Re:Technology preview: Sealed sender for Signal
by Terretta on Tuesday October 30, 2018 @08:31AM
(#18335874)
There are a ton of decidedly non-vocal casuals turning to ‘secure’ messengers to have chats they imagine are ‘military grade’ encrypted (they heard that was good) and not associated with their IRL identity (they consider that a must). They end up using terrible things and their entire chat histories exposed.
But they ‘know’ the phone number is a non starter because that’s how other social networks outed them. So they will also often end up using a string of bad tools as an awkward way to keep several worlds separate.
Most won’t admit it, but this second reason is why they, as iPhone users, aren’t in encrypted Messages for those chats. Neither end wants the chats in their phone number world.
While you can argue this use case is for hiding that one even participates in chats others might frown on, that to me sounds like a use case that matters, since today, most of the world doesn’t agree what should be frowned upon.
// This is not a technical assessment, it’s from the non-technical users’ point of view, how they think it’s working or not working. Same folks assume phone number is more identifying than finding an app that doesn’t need phone number because it can accept their FB log in. It’s a pretty rough world for non-techies.
But they ‘know’ the phone number is a non starter because that’s how other social networks outed them. So they will also often end up using a string of bad tools as an awkward way to keep several worlds separate.
Most won’t admit it, but this second reason is why they, as iPhone users, aren’t in encrypted Messages for those chats. Neither end wants the chats in their phone number world.
While you can argue this use case is for hiding that one even participates in chats others might frown on, that to me sounds like a use case that matters, since today, most of the world doesn’t agree what should be frowned upon.
// This is not a technical assessment, it’s from the non-technical users’ point of view, how they think it’s working or not working. Same folks assume phone number is more identifying than finding an app that doesn’t need phone number because it can accept their FB log in. It’s a pretty rough world for non-techies.