I couldn't believe it when I first signed up for Signal and people who had my number were * sent notifications * that I had just signed up. This could've included people I had blocked on my phone.
Same. One included an unstable individual who I was happy had forgotten me. Suddenly he messages me out of nowhere -- "Oh hey, you still exist! And you just installed Signal.... hmm, given what day it is, I'm guessing you're at such-and-such event?"
I think the Signal devs hadn't thought this through at all and just blindly copied what Telegram was already doing thinking it must be cool and trendy with the masses, without understanding their core user base at all.
Same with prioritizing stories, stickers and crypto payments as core features of Signal when that's not what most of their users care for. Meanwhile there's still no official way to port your existing chat history on PC and iOS to your new device, or support for Android tablets. Obviously, stickers are more important.
Signal (and Signal's phone number model) predates Telegram. It was designed as an SMS and WhatsApp replacement; that is, it was originally designed to replace insecure phone-number-addressed systems.
Obviously, the cryptographic guarantees of the two systems aren't even close to comparable.
They're messengers. They have messenger features. The details of how those features are implemented is what matter. Last I checked, Telegram doesn't even have encrypted group messaging, and it has a serverside database of who's talking to who.
I don't know what "feature" you're talking about not existing until 2014, but before Open Whisper Systems, the thing we call Signal was "TextSecure", a literal SMS replacement.
This is true. At every point where Telegram and Signal had the choice between being a pleasant messenger experience or being secure and private, each made decisions consistent with all their previous decisions.
Forcing you to use your phone number and then the same second you created your account go behind your back and spam everyone you just did so is neither private nor something many would associate with secure.
I guess something doesn't have to be secure if you can pretend it is public.
Of course Signal has carefully designed their goals to allow them to do that but in doing so that is a straight up asshole move in a context where they should be seeking trust?
Absolutely mind bending.
This is a great improvement, but they have already proven they can't be trusted with anyone's phone number so it is a damn shame they still won't allow you to create an account without one.
It is a decent service otherwise, but my fricking god I hope they at some point realize the harm they've done.
Up until today I've been ashamed of suggesting signal. Hopefully that will change with this feature.
My general experience in discussing this over the last 10 years is that nerds like us generally find it absolutely mindbending when privacy services make decisions in the interests of ordinary people, such as using the phone-number-based addressing ordinary people already use in order to minimize serverside metadata. But I think it mostly just speaks to how carefully people aren't thinking about the project's goals, and the fixation they have on their own goals. A lot of people are just super angry they can't write their own TUI for Signal.
Having to share your phone number does not meaningfully affect security and privacy. Being able to sign up without a phone number enables anonymity. Anonymity and privacy are related, to be sure, but anonymity is not required for privacy.
I think it's a mischaracterization to say that they spam "everyone" when you create an account. They only tell others who a) have you in their contact lists, and b) have an account with Signal too. I agree, though, that they should be more transparent about this, and require that you opt in to this behavior.
Personally, though, I don't mind it; for the most part this is how I've discovered other contacts on Signal, and vice versa. But I can understand why it makes some people uncomfortable.
What I find "absolutely mind bending" is that this is such a big deal-breaker for people such as yourself. While I wouldn't call it a nothingburger, it's -- to me -- at most a simple error in assuming what people are comfortable with.
Edit: I re-read what a few others had said upthread about how indiscriminate this new-user notification is. The examples of notifications being sent to users that had been blocked via the phone's built-in call/SMS blocking features are especially chilling. There's really no excuse for that, but still, to me this automatic notification is a feature developed in good faith, with good intentions, not some nefarious privacy invasion. They should be taken to task for its failings, but dismissing the entire platform over it seems a bit over the top.
> Having to share your phone number does not meaningfully affect security and privacy.
Of course it does, way more than "meaningfully". I actually wonder if I got your message right taken that I am not a native speaker of English.
Do you mean that if your phone is public (and you are known to be the owner) you will not get creepy calls, have ot listed as a free pizza delivery for calls after 23:00, having it blacklisted, ....
I must have understood wrong.
Otherwise what is the number of your president/prime minister? Or the CEO of Google/Apple/... I do not think they are public.
TextSecure and Redphone did not upload your contacts to the cloud. No need to be a security expert to know that it's unwise to leak user state to contacts. In fact textsecure (now Silence) is the first SMS app to have a different colors for each contact to help the user avoid mistakingly messaging the wrong person.
Nothing about Signal is haphazardly borrowed from Telegram. The feature we're discussing was chosen to help Signal to grow from a few thousand users to 50M+ without needing to build a social graph on Signal servers.
This mechanism may not be ideal for all users, and it's possible that Signal has now outgrown it, but without it, there would be no Signal as we know it today.
>The feature we're discussing was chosen to help Signal to grow from a few thousand users to 50M+ without needing to build a social graph on Signal servers.
How did THAT feature help Signal grow?
You only receive that spammy message if you already have Signal installed and your contact already has it too.
Signal grew a lot in 2021 (in Europe) because of the pandemonium created by Meta when they announced a change in WhatsApp Privacy Policy so everyone rushed to install Signal but the initial surge, was short lived.
Moving the clocks forward to today, looking at my extended network of family, friends and acquaintances, almost everyone has Signal installed, but most don't use it anymore as it's too frustrating and feels dead, so everything is still on WhatsApp, especially groups. All the Signal groups I have, originally meant to replace the WhatsApp groups, slowly died out and people stopped posting on them or following them, defaulting instead back to the WhatsApp groups.
You don't fix this lack of retention with stickers and spammy messenges.
Stickers are more important because just like every other tech company, growth is the only way to stay in business. You can just run a business on delivering a good product to your customers anymore. You have to grow constantly, which means bringing in new customers which, by definition, aren't part of the core user base. It's gross and depressing and it enshitifies everything
>You can just run a business on delivering a good product to your customers anymore.
Who said Signal was a good product to begin with? And who though adding sticker would improve market share?
Casual users value UX and porting their chat history and VoIP calling vastly more than they value E-2-E encryption. You can't talk about growth when you fail to deliver on these fronts first. That's how Telegram and WhatsApps rule the market.
Adding stickers won't move the userbase needle when you already lost your potential users at the lack of chat history and UX.
That's not the point. The point is if stickers make people love Signal. Sticker are popular on other platforms as well but because those platforms are popular not because they have stickers.
What fantasy land are you posting from? Signal has 40 million users as of 2022 (this was the first stat I found on a quick DDG search, which is all the effort your post deserves).
Also: "Who said Signal was a good product to begin with?" LOL. Just read the comments on this link bro.
How does Signal count it's active userbase? Like I said, me and almost everyone else I know have it installed but don't regularly use it because most people don't really like it versus the established Telegram and Whatsapp.
Signal is known to store two points of data per (hashed) phone number: the first login date, and the most recent login date. The second point is sufficient to get a user count.
Having a "most recent login" doesn't prove someone is an active user. I use it about once every two days, am I also an active users? Compare that to WhatsApp which most people use multiple times a day or even multiple times per hour, and you get the picture of how popular or lack thereof Signal is by comparison.
Like I said, a lot of people have Signal, but very few use it as their primary messenger on a regular basis, and more of a "it's just there in case one of those tech nerds who told me to install it decided to message me on"
Yes, that is definitely a non-standard definition of "active user". It's not really a relative term - if you're signed in and sending/receiving messages, you're an active user.
I was all excited about Signal, but rarely use it because of this very feature. Once it started sending me notices about other users, I was extremely not happy. I was very hesitant since one of the first things it did was ask for access to contacts. I'm still pissed at myself for allowing it.
Hi there, engineer on the Signal Android app here. Just an FYI that the notifications are generated on the receiving client by detecting that one of their contacts newly showed up as a registered user -- they're not "sent out" by you when you register or anything. Also, these notifications have defaulted to being disabled for the last 1.5 years or so. So only people who go into their settings to manually turn them on should be seeing them at this point.
That said, the complaint around this is usually that people don't want others to know that they use Signal. And unfortunately there was no way to _really_ do that (until now), because if you open your chat list, you'll see all of your registered contacts. But in the 7.0 release, we added the ability to hide yourself from being discoverable by phone number at all. So for people who don't want anyone else to know that their phone number is registered with Signal, they now have that option.
How come it wasn't the default right from the start?
How can a privacy oriented company not see the privacy implication of this? Sometimes, you want to be forgotten by some people, and Signal is telling them you are still there and active on that number. I remember reading a story about someone getting into real trouble for that.
Without "usernames", the proper way to handle it would have been to not let anyone know you are on signal when they look up your number. To get into contact, send a message, then the recipient will receive a notification with the message and an option to rely. If the recipient doesn't respond, from the sender point of view, it should be as if the account didn't exist.
I personally don't have a problem with this feature, and it's actually how I discovered Signal use among many of my friends.
But I think it's inexcusable that these sorts of notifications could essentially allow someone to circumvent blocking done by one of their contacts. If I've blocked someone via my phone's default contact blocking mechanism, and then I join Signal, and that person is already on Signal, they should not suddenly be able to contact me... and even be explicitly invited to do so on their end!
I wouldn't be surprised, though, if neither Android nor iOS gives regular apps access to the blocked contacts list. So I'm not really sure how an app like Signal could solve this problem.
After I realized this happened to me, I uninstalled signal. But because of the way signal jumps in and replaces normal sms, I found out later that signal users were no longer sending/receiving plain text messages to/from me properly. I forget the details but it was really frustrating.. first it ate my contact list and contacted them, then after I uninstalled it held those contacts hostage, breaking comms with them because those users didn’t know they were still signaling me, not using a normal text message. I text, they reply with signal, I can’t ask them to uninstall their app, so now if I don’t reinstall the app myself or borrow a friends phone to try and reconfigure it then I guess we’re now out of touch forever? It’s not privacy-friendly to replace or hide built in functionality, it’s just an attempt to coerce people and to bolster your user numbers.
>now if I don’t reinstall the app myself or borrow a friends phone to try and reconfigure it then I guess we’re now out of touch forever? It’s not privacy-friendly to replace or hide built in functionality, it’s just an attempt to coerce people and to bolster your user numbers.
yeah, you need to authenticate to delete the account (aka deregister). How else would they verify that you are the owner of the account you want to delete?
So because they elected to blur the line between their own opt in service and a built in service, I have to jump through extra hoops to properly opt out and get my comms back up? That’s if you even realize any of this is happening. Whether it’s down to design or to negligence, that’s a pretty hostile user experience and it feels deliberate, especially since they pawed through my Contacts to “help” me into this position. I felt disrespected and no longer very confident in their stated values/mission. Hard to use or recommend after something like that
It would be interesting to know whether signal decided to fix the awful UX I’m describing or if the android/iOS app stores noticed the abuse and disallowed it
> We've discussed at length why this is not possible, but if you have more thoughts then please visit the forums. Please try not to open duplicate issues in the future, even if you feel like something is important.
The list of phone numbers with signal accounts is basically public. It kind of has to be. When a new number gets added and it matches someone in your address book, your app will tell you that one of your contacts has joined. People have always had the ability to turn off that feature, but that's not what the feature request seems to be asking.
People seem to be asking for a way they can join Signal without their number showing up in the registry of Signal users. This is why it's "not possible".
edit: This may have changed today. I'm now seeing an option that lets me hide my number from the registry. This means that even someone with my phone number will not be able to message me on Signal, which seems like a good deal to me.
Yes, this drove at least two people I know/encouraged to use it off the platform. When people see this they also think that Signal snooped their contacts. Very bad.
This and the iPad "We'll remind you later" iPad notification nag are significant problems. I am a big supporter of Signal, but it's certainly hostile to those escaping an abusive situation. Usernames are a step in the right direction at least.
