IE, if somone intercepts the SMS code, even with reglock, you can forcibly de-register somone. This means if you use loose access to your phone number, you can easily loose access to your signal account.
https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/issues/12595#iss...
They justify this by saying "The intention of reglock is to prevent hijacking of numbers you actually own, not to guarantee the number for yourself for life", but its way to easy for activists and dissidents to lose ownership (temperately or permanently) of phone numbers for the phone number system to be the backbone identity system for a secure messaging platform
I was hoping this would be the case. It's the problem with telegram too, you can show a username but you must still have a phone number.
Matrix does this really well though. So I use that a lot. Unfortunately not many people do.
There are many useful non-social network features that they can implement and test that would greatly improve its usefulness as secure p2p communication platform.
And a formatting feature with (seemingly? would love to be wrong there) no syntax to use it without clicking/taping everywhere which makes it useless for me (and frustrating because with a syntax (say, markdown like?) I would love it).
The friction is slight for users, but higher for scammers that might go through thousands of accounts. Telegram is too easy to sign up, so it's mostly scams.
Whatcha selling :)
To coordinate my own anonymous commodity transactions I just use gpg to encrypt a .txt which can be delivered in all sorts of anonymous ways. I can't say that I transact anonymously too frequently though, so the additional friction with this method isn't especially onerous.
Many, Many reporters put their signal number in twitter bio seeking tips. Many activists (including me) use signal group chats to organize volenteers and staff, and publicly share room links. In other words, we have to either share our number publicly or buy a burner phone number if we want people to interact with us on signal.
Telegram has always been more social and more for communities or groups of potential strangers.
The fact that people complain about Signal doxing you is in some ways a good sign, because it suggests Signal has become so popular and trusted that strangers want to use it to communicate privately.
Signal helped pave the way for mainstream society to use communication tools that respect them without being a hacker or messing with a terminal.
Also the original purpose of signal was secure sms, so using phone numbers make perfect sense.
https://signal.org/blog/private-contact-discovery/
Of course, they have the ability to push a new client that hoovers up whatever they want, especially with their time-bomb policy of preventing old clients from sending messages until they're updated. But I was impressed by the lengths that they go to to build this privacy-preserving contact discovery service. I was especially interested to see their use of remote attestation "for good" and to preserve privacy and freedom, rather than systems like DRM and WEI that seek to compromise those.
Phone numbers are a quite ridiculously small problem compared to that.
Even Whatsapp is better than this.
And what is that phone number fetish? It's not like it is some magic identifier. There are bots out there testing every number out there and sending you SNS spam. Your phone number is worthless.
As far as I remember, you can still find people on Telegram by searching for phone numbers. Isn't there even an automatic discovery feature?
The Telegram salt around those announcements seems like the final cry of Telegram fans to me because after that, there is absolutely nothing which would even remotely paint Telegram as a safe or secure messenger. Especially because everybody know why you are on Telegram. It's a different use case. I talk on Signal to people I know personally. They already have my number. People I know go on Telegram for porn and piracy over here. They still have Whatsapp or Signal to talk to their friends and family. They actually are ashamed that they have Telegram because everybody here know why they have it ;)
You can argue its not social media, but I think the stories feature definitely puts it on the social media spectrum to some degree.
If it walks like a duck.
