Which is also what you do when you vote. You control who has your identifying information and who has the information on how you voted. Which I guess is still different from Signal if we are still talking about that. Since you cannot control who has your identifying information.

Ah… I guess I didn’t understand how services like encrypted webmail worked. I’ve only ever used local pgp with thunderbird or whatever. I was assuming (incorrectly) that those services operated in the same manner. Thanks for explaining it to me.

I’m not finding any definitions of “privacy” that suggest the term refers to control of something. Regardless of whether that something is within or outside of your reach.

You appear to be saying that like it is a bad thing, rather than a good thing. Easily making multiple accounts is a crucial part of anonymity and privacy.

If it is tied to a phone number then any information connected to the phone account will be connected to the signal account identity. And any identifying information attached to the method used to pay for the phone account will be attached to the phone account and consequently the signal account.

Typically people pay using credit or debit cards, so the identifying information of those bank accounts become attached to your signal account.

Airvpn doesn’t require any personal information. I mean… I guess it asked for a name or whatever, but it doesn’t verify any of it. I certainly didn’t give it anything legitimate, and I paid with mixed crypto so it certainly has as little personal information on me as would be possible with a vpn.

What gives ivpn, mullvad and nym the advantage for the personal info section?

That and the need of an android or iphone in order to create an account… ;[

It is and isn’t.

I’d compare the people who use technologies like this to the internet users of the 90’s and those who use facebag, tweeker and insta to the AOL users back then.

Yes, we’re the minority, but that is how people have always been. Most people don’t want freedom. But those that do still have plenty of options. Don’t forget that “they” didn’t originally plan on us plebes having true encryption tech and privacy cryptos. It is possible that we are doing better than it looks.

But yea… his comment sounds more like something we would have said 20 years ago, rather than the present. I agree with your point.

mailinator still works well for a lot of things.

And it really isn’t nearly as bad as you think it is. Most of those services that are locked down to that level (like signal) aren’t worth using. Hell, even reddit still doesn’t even require email. Although they pester you about it a little now.

I know telegram won’t accept voip numbers. I think I remember trying with signal as well with the same results. Clearly they attach enough importance to only having accounts with easily trackable devices like android and iphone devices that they are putting significant effort into blocking all other accounts.

You’d have to anonymously buy a preloaded sim and a burner droid phone to make the account. Its a lot less effort to use other more privacy friendly systems. Even more so if you’re making multiple temporary accounts, which is also an important part of reducing your trackability.

Who you are specifically (name etc) and the same amount of information on everyone you have talked to on signal and when you talked. Basically everything except for the actual content of the messages.

This is disturbing that this comment is down voted to -11, at the time of my reading, on a service that is specifically designed for people who value privacy. Is it because of some government bot, or are enough people really that emotionally attached to this product that despite the clear logic they are reacting in discomfort?

I don’t know which option is more disturbing.

I get that a lot of people don’t really value privacy that much, and are only interested in making a half hearted attempt. That is fine. But why the gross amount of denial? Why not just be honest that they think it is good enough for them, and not worth changing.

Just the fact that signal can, and we can assume, does share all the other data outside of the actual message content is a big deal.

You’re just not going to go to the extra effort of requiring a phone number and storing that information if your business model isn’t dependent on selling that information to parties who would want it. That takes a lot more effort than just giving out username/password pairs.

And given their scale and length of time they have been around, it is guaranteed that they have been complying for some time.

It is so ironic that we run into so much cognitive dissonance on this issue. It is so weird that people have such an emotional attachment to this product.

I don’t know about lavabit specifically, but typically encrypted emails are encrypted on your client computer and decrypted on the recipient’s computer. It is conceptually the same thing as an “end to end encrypted chat app”… just in email form.

It wouldn’t work very well if it wasn’t.

Anonymity is a very big part of privacy and always has been. That is why you don’t write your name on your voting ballot.

Which definitely begs the question of why people put any effort into trying to move any of their contacts to signal in the first place. I believe the answer is that they didn’t value privacy either. Just the idea of it.