Privacy

37753 readers

825 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 5 years ago

MODERATORS

127

Why does Signal want a phone number to register if it's supposedly privacy first? (programming.dev)

submitted 22 hours ago by 0101100101@programming.dev to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

217 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I remember a time when visiting a website that opens a javacript dialog box asking for your name so the message "hi " could be displayed was baulked at.

Why does signal want a phone number to register? Is there a better alternative?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] FreeWilliam@lemmy.ml 3 points 15 hours ago* (last edited 15 hours ago) (16 children)

Jami.net

Ignore the comment saying signal is "end to end encrypted" "private" etc They are simply stuck in a delusional state where they try to convince themselves that signal is the best option so they can continue using it. Nothing is private if it isn't fully libre because you never know what the proprietary code is doing. The signal protocol itself has its source code released, and the encryption and security code is publicly available, but the signal Foundation has stated that it uses both free code and proprietary code. Their reason is UI, but it's hard to make sure whatever proprietary code is being used for because you simply can't see it. As GNU puts it: "You're walking in a pitch black cave". Jami is fully libre and is a GNU project. You don't even need any phone number!

[–] solrize@lemmy.world 2 points 13 hours ago (2 children)

Jami, as much as I prefer it on various philosophical grounds, simply doesn't work very well at the moment. :(

[–] FreeWilliam@lemmy.ml 3 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

And we should report problems and fix them ourselves to make it better

[–] autonomoususer@lemmy.world 2 points 3 hours ago

Based

load more comments (13 replies)