Privacy

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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.

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

submitted 1 day ago by 0101100101@programming.dev to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

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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?

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[–] rottingleaf@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

            
              When people would complain about JS on webpages, they were not.
Completely different things overlap all the time.
Because your status updates and messages are encrypted and stored (until retrieved, of course) once for every recipient, and that includes your other devices and their other devices.

[–] solrize@lemmy.world 1 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

Because your status updates and messages are encrypted and stored (until retrieved, of course) once for every recipient, and that includes your other devices and their other devices.

I'd like to see a numerical estimate of how much data this is. But, it sounds to me like more reason to want to self-host.

I don't see any point to rehashing the other stuff. Non-TLS websites mostly went away once DNS spoofing at wifi hotspots became widespread.

[–] rottingleaf@lemmy.world 1 points 7 hours ago

But, it sounds to me like more reason to want to self-host.

So do that. You can do that with Signal.

I don’t see any point to rehashing the other stuff. Non-TLS websites mostly went away once DNS spoofing at wifi hotspots became widespread.

Maybe I wasn't clear, someone said that back in the day registration on a website was a new and bad thing, connecting it with privacy and comparing to Signal asking for phone number. I answered with the idea that not much commonly thought from that time about privacy has aged well. You wouldn't register on websites, but you would communicate with them over plaintext. I hope that makes it clearer.