Free and Open Source Software

17919 readers

86 users here now

If it's free and open source and it's also software, it can be discussed here. Subcommunity of Technology.

This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

159

Signal Blog: Keep your phone number private with Signal usernames (signal.org)

submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

34 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Finally, we can have usernames in Signal instead of giving our phone number to everybody.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago (1 children)

If that's a concern you could also always use Threema, which has been built from the ground up to use anonymous random IDs and optionally lets you link a phone number or e-mail address to that ID. The company has also won important court cases against having to store metadata preemptively and responding to blanket requests by law enforcement.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

I never heard about Threema before,
quickly glanced at it's Github repo,
but I think I prefer Matrix/Element over it.

Threema seems to largely rely om GMS (Google Messaging Service),
meaning that most messages will go through Google's servers,
albeit end-to-end encrypted for now,
I would not be suprised if Google would participate in "Harvest now, Decrypt later".

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

There's actually an option to turn GMS off entirely if that's a concern (Settings-->About-->Advanced). It comes at the cost of slightly increased battery usage. Sadly Google does have a bit of a monopoly on mainstream Android there.
Having said that, the messages themselves should never pass Google's servers, just a packet saying "check your Threema server, there's new stuff waiting for you."