Comment by codedokode
2 years ago
A list of phone numbers and little money is easily exchanged to names and addresses on black market in many countries.
2 years ago
A list of phone numbers and little money is easily exchanged to names and addresses on black market in many countries.
And how to these black markets connect the phone numbers to names? I guess from data collected from more insecure sources. So I think Signal is being responsible with their data.
Also, you need some way to log in to your account. So you need an identifier and some way to validate that you are the owner of that identity. And next to that you want to prevent spam. So I think the choice to use a phone number as an identifier for a text-messaging app that is meant to be a secure replacement of SMS is not that weird.
But let's say they are data hoarding our phone numbers, and they can get other details about us through the black market because we use other more insecure services where we suddenly don't seem to care about privacy. Then what do you think Signal does with this data? They can't resell it because they don't have anything unique, they actually need to invest money to link their database of just phone numbers to something else. And then? What malicious things will they be able to do?
Ok, now you have a list of people's names and you know they have signal installed. Google and Apple also have this (presuming you installed it via a mobile app store). Your carrier has this (from the IP addresses on your messages).
What have you gained? What does the attack look like?