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

submitted 8 months ago by UNIX84 to c/foss

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

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[–] Radiant_sir_radiant 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.

[–] Rikj000@discuss.tchncs.de 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".

[–] Radiant_sir_radiant 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."