this post was submitted on 28 Aug 2024
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Privacy
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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.
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Most people, even in this very thread, clearly don't understand the implications of phone number harvesting. Also do give citations for your bombastic claim that most people don't want anonymity.
The graph of who communicates with whom is precisely the problem. The government can easily correlate that data with all the other data they have on people, and then if somebody is identified as a person of interest it becomes easy to find other people who associate with them. So, here you just proved my point by showing that you yourself don't understand the implications of metadata harvesting.
This is entirely dependent on the situation. Privacy is not a black or white thing where you're completely private or not private at all. Everyone lives some part of their life publicly. I don't have data on this unfortunately, but typically where I live, people share phone numbers to people they personally know.
This is not within the vast majority of most peoples threat model.
I never suggested privacy was black and white. What I actually said was that a lot of people aren't making an informed choice. And whenever these threads come up, people pile on to dismiss legitimate problems with the way Signal works which makes it harder for people to make informed choices by spreading noise and misinformation. This very thread is full of wrong claims and dismissals.
Majority of people don't even need Signal because they're not talking about anything anybody cares about. At that point you can use whatever messenger that's convenient and your circle of friends uses. However, people shove Signal down other people's throat claiming that it's a privacy focused app which it demonstrably is not.
This is about Signal having the phone numbers. I don't think anybody "personally knows" Signal..