Comment by wolvoleo
1 day ago
Ugh wtf so I need a Google account on Android? That's not going to happen.
For an org that pretends to care about privacy you'd imagine there'd be a way to avoid, you know, the biggest privacy invader on the planet.
Just allow monero payments or something. Alongside Google play for the sheep that want to use that.
> Just allow monero payments or something.
This is the right solution. A one-time payment in crypto, say $5, ought to be enough to prevent spam. That being said, Signal has demonstrated (when presented a warrant) that they do not store phone numbers. If I remember correctly all they stored was an account ID and a UNIX timestamp such as the last login.
> If I remember correctly all they stored was an account ID and a UNIX timestamp such as the last login.
How do they perform address book matching without an phone number? It just being accessible by SGX does not really count as not storing it.
Problem with phone numbers is they are to short to store as a hash, since you can brute force the sha256 of an phone number in a trivial amount of time on a single consumer device
Wouldn't a payment of about $0.05 do the trick? My understanding of most kinds of spam is that it relies on being able to deploy hundreds of thousands of bot accounts just to get a few hits.
This is for registering an account that can then send many many messages.
Hopefully they eventually make a way to pay without it.
You wouldn't believe the spam if they did that
Why? Just raise the prices if they get more spam on non-google payments.
I've literally registered a Signal account on one of the free SMS sites floating around. Why would spammers choose the payment route over phone numbers? They would just choose the one that's cheaper.
Are you being hyperbolic, or do you really consider Google the worst with regards to privacy.
The most ubiquitous, absolutely. Their data collection is unparalleled. They're on almost every website, app, they have fingers into payment and browsers and mobile OSes.
In terms of what they do with big data there's more evil parties like Palantir but data abuse starts with collecting it, and I would object to it even if Google promised to only use it for good. For me my privacy is already violated when my data is collected, not just when it's abused. And I do consider Google's use of that data abusive, just not in the worst ways.
Google is a bad as a phone number since it also has strong ties to your real identity
Yes. Google is even worse imho.
Google is objectively the worst
Can you actually make a Google account without a phone number these days?
googles obligation to hand out all account linked info notwithstanding, one may still create google accounts without associating a phone number, by doing so on old android versions. signal does however explicitly force credit card info here, thus providing direct individual traceability ..
Plus they are mandating you give your details to Google. So much for privacy