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Signal tests usernames that keep your phone number private
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this post was submitted on 08 Nov 2023
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Privacy
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Some question to be honest. I cannot expect any privacy if I have to share my phone number.
Privacy and anonimity are different things. As long as nobody besides you and the indented destination(s) has access to the content of your communication, that communication maintains privacy, even if everyone sees that it's you talking.
Also, and this is something I mention all the time, the only information this gives is that you use signal. Besides that, as soon as anybody else registered your phone in their contact list, your phone number is already known and associated with you considering that many apps (like all the meta ones) gain access to the contact list and the chance that anybody who has your phone number uses one of those is almost 100%.
App-accessible contact lists is the original sin of smartphones. As a result, a few powerful corporations know the social graph of entire countries. The handful of people who make efforts to stay anonymous be damned - they're in the database too thanks to their friends. This one infuriating feature makes decent privacy all but impossible.
They do their best to use the number in ways no one but your contacts who use Signal can actually see what that number is, to be fair. And you're still private either way. What a phone number breaks is anonymity, which is something they don't explicitely claim to give you. (I think)