They are more like numeric user names.Ĭontrary to popular belief, your Signal account is not linked to your phone number, but rather to an automatically generated number called a private key. But what they may not know is that Signal does not require you to use your phone number at all.Īs our instructors explain in more depth during our Signal and Surveillance workshop, what most people don’t realize is that Signal “phone numbers” are not really phone numbers. In situations where you need both privacy and anonymity, this reluctance makes a lot of sense. One of the most common reasons some people cite for not using Signal is because they don’t want to give out their phone number to the same people they want to send encrypted messages to. In short, Signal is great, except for the fact that you need a phone number to use it. Its battle-tested encryption protocol is licensed for use by the likes of Facebook in WhatsApp, and it has been adopted by the XMPP Standards Foundation for use as the basis of OMEMO Multi-End Message and Object Encryption. The Signal Private Messenger app has become the de-facto standard for end-to-end encrypted messaging.

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