Comment by FlamingMoe
2 years ago
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.
2 years ago
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?"
Absolutely unacceptable.
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.
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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.
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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
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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.
> But in the 7.0 release, we added
great, but what about all of those people that installed before 7.0 and had it already happen to them? "oops" doesn't help. at. all.
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
Signal has not supported SMS for quite a while now.
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
https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/issues/7409
> 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.
I wonder why this is "not possible"
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.
One of the many reasons to never sign up for a service that requires your phone number, or have a special number just for this purpose.
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.
I've seen this on Telegram but never on Signal. I use Signal on both iOS and Windows.
I uninstalled Signal and haven't looked back due to the constant `X from your address book has joined Signal` notifications that you can't disable.
Except that, you can actually disable them.
https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360007061452-Do...
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There's a setting for it on Android at least:
Settings > Notifications > Notify When > Contact joins Signal
I think you can turn that off with telegram, but I'm not sure if it's still the case.