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A comment on Signal Is Back. Parent comment

Re:Signal Is Back by jsilence on Sunday January 17, 2021 @04:45AM (#25809459)
A couple of days ago an old long forgotten friend popped up apparently using Telegram now. Looking at the profile picture it became very clear that friend must have abandoned this phone number a while ago.

Not really a privacy issue for the new user, since this is his public avatar, but a nice reminder for this issue that phone number are ill suited as identifiers

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Re:Signal Is Back by footrot on Sunday January 17, 2021 @06:45AM (#25809975)
Phone numbers make sense for quick onboarding, but for multiple numbers, identities, it all becomes a mess.

I am not even that interested in having a fixed phone number, I would rather ever changing throwaways for many contacts.

As soon as my number gets into the wrong hands, the fight against spam is painful, and I have to drop it.

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Re:Signal Is Back by foolmeonce on Sunday January 17, 2021 @06:12AM (#25809823)
> phone number are ill suited as identifiers

Yes and no.. I think a resource like a phone number is better than the yahoo/etc email reallocation situation. So far it seems to be rarer that someone tries to get allocated a number to impersonate a previous owner's identity.

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