This is the sole complaint I have with Signal (and one of many complaints with Telegram).
It's impossible to create an anon account, which I imagine would be very important for someone needing a secured messaging service in mainland China, for example.
I have managed to keep a phone number for almost double-digit years. It would be amazing to not have to use my telco as the source of identity for my Signal communications. If Signal could change this one thing and allow (or maybe somehow prefer?) it to be linked to a mobile number it would have real feature advantages over all of the other random chat apps for phones. Signal call quality is jaw droppingly good, but thats hard to sell at the gas station or water cooler.
As it stands people I refer to Signal usually have a preferred chat app (which is unfortunately often facebook messenger) or SMS. IOS people have no reason to use it other than the amazing privacy benefits, and android people seem to be on whatever their mom isn't.
I would pay to not have to use my phone number for this service.
Im asking for an alternative canonical source of identity other than an extremely trustworthy telco.
Some other conglomerated examples are: Scanning a QR code in person to initiate discovery, or querying other data in the phone's "contacts" PIM app for example, email, or more imaginatively, keybase, or maybe mail out QR codes to residential address for a nominal fee?
Can you clarify what you mean? I use Signal without Google Play Store/Services and am curious about said requirement.
> it relies on me a phone number as an ID
I dislike this also, but what's the alternative? A phone number is (usually) a long-lived, relatively immutable identifier which is convenient, memorable and portable. It is highly usable and that may be more important than other considerations.
Making phone and e-mail optional, and being a tier-1 identity. That's what Matrix does.
Can you talk about battery requirements? For me, it proved to be a major battery drain to the point I uninstalled Signal. I don't seem to be the only one with this issue [1].
[1]: https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/issues/6898
And I don't know if anyone else has mentioned this, but uploading entire contact lists should also not be considered a natural feature of a secure mobile messenger.
I don't follow. How is security equal to anonymity? If anything, security is what enables privacy, which could enable anonymity. There are plenty of circumstances where you need security, but not anonymity - for example a message to your partner. Of course if you do need anonymity, there's a lot more involved than simply installing a "secure app" or anything of that sort.
> Tying your identity to a phone number that can only be obtained by handing a telecom your government identity documents fails.
I don't know about that in the US. I was able to open a pre-paid T-Mobile account to use with my LineageOS Android device without identity verification. Perhaps it is different elsewhere now?
> And I don't know if anyone else has mentioned this, but uploading entire contact lists should also not be considered a natural feature of a secure mobile messenger.
That sounds troubling, is it what Signal does? Would like to read more about that - is there a Github issue for reference?
https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360007319011-Ed...
https://signal.org/blog/contact-discovery/
But if you don't believe anonymity is an important component for security, you probably think hashes uploaded and deleted are perfectly secure, too, so we're probably not going to come to any agreement here.
Personally, I do wish they'd decouple from phone numbers and allow users an option not to transmit hashes for their entire contact list. I don't think these are unreasonable features for a messenger that's supposed to be designed for privacy and activism.
It would make a good feature, but anonymity is not a requirement for privacy. I want my connection to the bank's website to be private, but there's no need for it to be anonymous. Signal offers a lot of advantage over traditional SMS with familiar usability. It doesn't perfectly solve everyone's threat model for privacy and anonymity, and doesn't have to.
One, it insists on me giving more permissions to Google services, where it's very difficult to go around this requirements.
But worse, it relies on me a phone number as an ID. I keep changing my phone number, I don't wanna share my phone number, and I really think that the computer in my pocket should finally be completely separated from this old concept of a phone. Please give me another way to open a Signal account.