Privacy

31982 readers

335 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

Chat rooms

[Matrix/Element]Dead
Discord

much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

635

Signal introduces usernames and phone number privacy. (signal.org)

submitted 9 months ago by 7eter@feddit.de to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

94 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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

[–] psychothumbs@lemmy.world 1 points 8 months ago

In my opinion, relying on upgrading users automagically to an encrypted and secure protocol isn’t good practice. If someone wants to use an encrypted chat, they should do so consciously. It will only cause confusion otherwise.

This is my theory for why they ditched this feature - the ultra-concerned about privacy superusers don't approve of its messiness, even though in practice it's the main engine for user growth.

Do people still use SMS these days though anyway?

I would have thought iMessage, RCS and separate chat apps like Whatsapp, Signal and WeChat would have largely replaced SMS by now.

SMS, MMS, iMessage and RCS are all compatible with each other and mostly used interchangeably and are the main way people text each other (in the US anyway). You just have a phone number, and when people text it with any of those formats you receive the message and respond the same way.