You can use a username only for finding and adding friends, you only need the phone number to create an account. That’s probably because Signal started as an alternative to Messages (or whatever it was called back then), so you could send SMS if you wanted, or secure messages to friends w/ Signal. The whole point was to be a gentle transition from SMS to private messaging. However, they eventually dropped the SMS feature, but it seems they kept the phone number as username thing.
It kind of sucks, but I think that’s a reasonable limitation since the vast majority of people using this service will have a phone number. You could probably even sign up for a free trial of something (e.g. Google Fi) to sign up for Signal, set up the username, and then drop the phone number service. I don’t know if there are any problems with this, but I don’t think they do anything with your phone number after everything is set up.
Another issue with phone numbers is that it makes it easier to censor - from what I heard, in Iran the confirmation SMS just would not arrive, making rentals the only option (thus making you risk your account being deleted by the new owner).
My personal biggest issue with Signal, though, was the inability to register from the official desktop client. They were pushing to register on mobile instead. There are ways around it, like Signal-Cli (what I used) and Android VMs. However, the fact that they push people onto mobile at all is worrying, because phones are much harder to make private (while you can install Linux onto pretty much any given laptop/desktop, only certain phones are compatible with alternative OSes, and mine wasn’t so I could not trust it with my chats).
Hmm, I guess then you’d need to get a VPN that works in your country (not sure how hard that is in Iran) and find a VOIP service that either doesn’t require any payment, or accepts payments from Iran.
It’s certainly not ideal, and I wish they’d eliminate the dependency on phone numbers, but until then, there are options for most people to create an account w/o having a permanent number.
You can use Monero for payment, I started doing this ever since sanctions began. Free services are not really viable because they’re far more likely to have all their numbers already used up.
But yea, the overall point is that it is a large inconvenience and a possible point of failure (the next number user deleting the account).
Google is a very bad choice because it requires a phone number on its own. Also heard that there may be additional KYC.
Are you suggesting you need a phone number to get a phone number from Google Fi?
And yeah, it’ll definitely to KYC, because that’s a federal regulation. My point is that you don’t need the number long-term, so the number will only be associated with you for like a week while the trial period lasts. So sign up for Google Fi trial, create a Signal account, then cancel the trial. That sounds pretty reasonable to me.
Yea. Don’t you need a Google account first to use such a service? Those do need phone numbers to register.
And also KYC is unacceptable in this case, imo. If the number is needed only for a short time, there are similar, non-KYC options like what you would find on kycnot.me.
Big concern with your number being recycled and a new user receiving the signal activation key on that number.
Sure, and I think that would send a message to all of your contacts that a new account is using that number, but I’m honestly not sure. If you have an active account (i.e. on a desktop or something), I think you can just change your number if that happens (i.e. get another temp number).
It’s certainly more convenient if you use a longer-term number, but I think it’s feasible with a throwaway number. Once your account is set up, Signal doesn’t need your number for anything if you disable publishing that.
I think another reason they use a phone number is that it can mitigate issues with people or bots creating hundred of accounts maybe
Yeah. And I don’t fault them for this route. I just with I could sign up without a phone number. Maybe the username thing is a predecessor to allowing usernam-only registration in the future.
Yeah, hopefully. It would also be awesome to have a web login so I could access messages and whatnot when using someone else’s computer w/o having to install something.
I don’t know what direction they’re going, but I’m honestly okay with the caveats that currently exist.
Having web logon would mean they would need to hold the decryption key in some form (or have a weak decryption key, your credentials), so, while convenient, I think it would degrade security and possibly privacy. Unless you mean to receive new messages, the way the desktop app works?
