Comment by shp0ngle
2 years ago
Signal will not publicly admit that, but they are using phone numbers as a cheap anti-spam measure. If anyone can sign up with an email, you will have same spam problems as with email, and will need to implement some spam filtering, and so on.
It's harder to spam with phones. Although, as they now do in Burma, they can just kidnap a lot of people from China and India and keep them as slaves and make them send spam from phones. But anyway that's a different story
I feel like Signal has been up front for many years about why they use phone numbers, and I get incessant spam on other phone number platforms (most especially: phones) so I'm not sure that holds water.
They seem to actually confirm it themselves, which I didn't know.
> We use third-party services to send a registration code via SMS or voice call in order to verify that the person in possession of a given phone number actually intended to sign up for a Signal account. This is a critical step in helping to prevent spam accounts from signing up for the service and rendering it completely unusable—a non-trivial problem for any popular messaging app.
From their blogpost
I'm sure they absolutely do use it as a spam signal. You use what you've got. But that's not why they use phone number identifiers, which is a design decision they and others have written ad nauseam about.
They've been pretty public about it. And it's not cheap.
> Registration Fees: $6 million dollars per year.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38291427
They pay Twilio through the nose for this service, compared to using other vendors that are less than a tenth the cost.
Even Twilio has a hard time with deliverability of SMS due to spam blaclisting by carriers. There’s a reason why SMS delivery is so expensive, and why alternatives like WhatsApp want in on the action.
2 replies →
What if they allow non-phone-number-verified accounts to only place calls/texts to users only where the non-verified is already in that user's contacts?
That would prevent spam. The only people who would hear from the non-verified account is people who already took the effort to place the non-verified account username in their contacts.
(I've never used Signal and I have no idea what how it works.)
Whoa wait what? What's this about slavery?
see https://edition.cnn.com/interactive/2023/12/asia/chinese-sca...
google kk park, fraud factory.
Burma/Myanmar is in a state of civil war, close to China and close to cheap Thai mobile internet access. Chinese started building fraud parks where they capture people and force them to serially scam people on fake bitcoin exchanges (it starts as online romance, turns to bitcoin scam). Mostly Chinese but also increasingly Europeans and Americans
nobody does anything because those fraud parks are tolerated by Burmese junta. They are on the border between Thailand and Burma
David Rosenthal has more on the horrific backstory behind “pig-butchering” scams:
https://blog.dshr.org/2024/02/tracing-pig-butchers.html
They probably require phone numbers to be able to comply with the three-letter government agencies requirements and their requests on specific people. Metadata is specifically available "for free" (who calls/messages whom when).
> Metadata is specifically available "for free" (who calls/messages whom when).
That's completely incorrect. Signal has only the following data (backed up by what they have provided when served warrants[1], and what internal FBI documents state about Signal[2]:
[1] https://signal.org/bigbrother/central-california-grand-jury/
[2] https://propertyofthepeople.org/document-detail/?doc-id=2111...
This is simply not true. Signal implements sealed sender so they don’t know who is talking to who.
Signal has released demands for information and what they provided in response to those demands. It's not a hard question, it's on their website. Don't let yourself be yet another conspiracy theorist.
Source?