I really don’t get why so many people are turning this into a privacy versus anonymity debate when the real problem is censorship.
Yes, Signal needs a phone number to sign up, but replacing that with an email or username doesn’t make it anonymous. The real issue is that governments are blocking the registration SMS, so people can’t even sign up for the app in the first place.
Sure, there are workarounds, but most people aren’t going to jump through all those extra hoops just to use an app. If we want to spread privacy, how do we do that when Signal’s phone number requirement is actively working against us?
Instead of arguing over privacy versus anonymity, shouldn’t we focus on making sure everyone can access Signal without issues? What do you think?
Where are you seeing gov blocking SMS?
How about this - in order to get a sim card to receive that SMS in most EU countries, you need first to provide your ID to the goverment. Also applies for many other countries with less rights. Some of which might become suspicious if it’s a second separate SIM to your normal use one. So yeah, so much for anonymity.
2 and 3 are the whole point of the original post.
How do you figure?
Must not be important to them then.
Doesn’t need to be a government issued ID iirc, also doesn’t have to be issued by the country you are trying to purchase it in.
https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/issues/11561
There’s any number of reasons for SMS not to be sent. I’ve had this problem on various platforms as well.
The point is that people can’t sign up for Signal due to blocked SMS. Arguing privacy versus anonymity is pointless when there is a denial of service.
These are 2 unrelated conversations. If you want to have either one of them, we can do that, but you can’t use one to argue the other. You can’t argue that you can’t sign up for Signal because the service isn’t private. That’s simply inaccurate.
This is never written anywhere in that comment. Is it too hard to read? Which part is confusing?
You haven’t provided any evidence that it’s “blocked” or that there is any “denial of service”. As far as I can tell, the user has network issues.
Why are all the ‘network issues’ always effecting phone numbers starting with the same country code?
Are they?