this post was submitted on 20 Mar 2026
469 points (86.4% liked)
Privacy
47371 readers
1825 users here now
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.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don't promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
founded 6 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
What evidence do you have that Signal collects anything? Traffic logs from the app or something?
Signal doesn't need to, you need to trust the whole chain. You'll need to trust AWS, you need to trust Intel SGX, etc
At that point you can rely on nothing but Tor or I2P
Nothing else hides metadata better than Signal, without involving large networks of independent nodes that participate in Sybil resistant routing. The only thing that gets close is threshold schemes where you still need multiple independent entities running servers.
The phrase "E2E encryption" definitionally means it applies when you don't trust whole chain.
It uses a phone number.
Phone numbers havent been required for at least like a year or so
That isn't true. You still need a phone number to sign up.
Hm now I wonder what to do about that, as they have had my number for a while now.
Do they let you sign up purely with username and password? Or do they make you use insecure email?
You can check if a number is registered with Signal just by having Signal and starting a chat with that number
Even if the number is set as hidden in settings?
They changed that. You can make yourself undiscoverable by just the number now
This is as shady as Telegram to me tbqh