signal requires a phone number to sign up. a phone number could be used to trace your signal account back to you. so why do people, especially privacy enthusiasts and experts (like edward snowden), still use it and endorse it when it lacks anonymity in that sense? i get that people could use a voip number or something to sign up, but still.
This is such an old argument. Signal competes with WhatsApp. How are you going to find your friends when you leave WhatsApp? And when I say “you” I don’t mean you, @[email protected], the privacy enthusiast who doesn’t use Apple, has a degoogled phone, an encrypted hard-drive, uses GPG in their email which is either self-hosted or something like ProtonMail, refuses to use Chrome, uses Gnu Linux exclusively, doesn’t possess a credit card and uses cash exclusively, self-hosts their own cloud with BitWarden, CollaboraOnline, ownCloud or Nextcloud, and has requested their information be removed from every service they stop using.
I mean that kid who just uses phones to stay in touch with friends, the 50 year old secretary who grew up with Excel and Word but struggles to use a computer, the builder who sees tech as a necessary evil, that grandma just wanting to get a hold of their grandchild who lives overseas, that person who wants to talk to an old friend who isn’t reachable on WhatsApp anymore, or the sceptic who goes “I bet my friends don’t even use this app…”
Are you going to force them all to somehow find out the pseudonym of their entire friendlist just to be able to talk to them? Are you going to make them jump through hoops to be able to take advantage of a more private alternative? Are you going to demand the barrier for entry be elevated to reduce the number of users?