Comment by greysonp
2 years ago
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.