Privacy

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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

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How I Got a Truly Anonymous Signal Account (theintercept.com)

submitted 4 months ago by BrikoX@lemmy.zip to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

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Yes, you can use Signal without sharing your personal phone number. Here’s how I did it.

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[–] BrikoX@lemmy.zip 9 points 4 months ago (1 children)

It's there for a reason. You can't easily create a spam waves if you need a phone number to create an account. And they added usernames now, so you don't need to share your phone number with people you want to talk to. It's just there to create an account and can be hidden after that.

There is Session, that uses UUIDs for names with no phone number requirement, which is basically a fork of Signal with decentralized Loki on top of it.

[–] sqgl@beehaw.org 4 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

Isn't spoofing a phone number easy for scammers? If so, I don't understand why there is (admittedly) so little spam on Signal.

Does Signal require 2FA upon registration? (I cannot recall)

[–] BrikoX@lemmy.zip 3 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Spoofing just changes the displayed called/sender ID, not the actual number. They would still need real numbers for each account. And they block a lot of VoIP numbers, like most services these days. And getting carrier SIMs or e-SIMs is a not that easy.

No mandatory 2FA as far as I know.

[–] sqgl@beehaw.org 4 points 4 months ago

No mandatory 2FA as far as I know.

Then how is the authenticity of a number tested by Signal?