this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2025
223 points (97.4% liked)

Technology

72577 readers
4574 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related news or articles.
  3. Be excellent to each other!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
  10. Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.

Approved Bots


founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 26 points 2 weeks ago (26 children)

If you join a large WhatsApp group, anyone in that group will have everyone else's phone number, and they can use that to learn far more about everyone's identities.

Does it not give away your identity when you join a Signal group?

[–] [email protected] 46 points 2 weeks ago (8 children)

Signal defaults to hiding your phone number since the release of user names: https://signal.org/blog/phone-number-privacy-usernames/

[–] [email protected] -3 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

But they must still have your phone number and associate it with your username. So it would still be easy for a government organization to force Signal to give up the identities of all people who join a group.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Wrong. Signal servers don't know of group members.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

Really? That's interesting. But the group membership list must be persisted somewhere, no? Otherwise, you wouldn't know where to send and receive messages. So where is it persisted then?

And also, how would you add someone to a group? When you add a new user to a group, would he be able to view all previous messages? Is it possible for this to scale to, say, a thousand or a million users?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago

They can't get your username from your phone number (but they can b'get your phone number from your username)

load more comments (5 replies)
load more comments (22 replies)