Comment by godelski | Hacker News Reader

Comment by godelski | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I think it is a holdover from the Text Secure days. And like others say, it's a different problem.

But for solutions, can't you just buy a voip number? You just need it for registration and then can dump it. I'm sure you can buy one with cash or zcash if you're really paranoid.

While in the US I don't have to show my gov ID to get a phone number, I don't know anyone who buys a phone with cash except international students. So practically everyone is identifiable anyways. But I'm not sure this is a deal breaker since all I'm leaking is that I have registered a Signal account. AFAIK Signal only has logs of an account existing and last online with 24hr resolution (which avoids many collision deanonymization methods). Even paying with cash is hard as I'm probably caught on camera (but these usually get flushed).

So I'm legitimately curious, why is this a dealbreaker? It doesn't seem like a concern for the vast majority of people, and the problem Signal is solving is secure communication for the masses, not the most secure method possible with unbounded complexity. It's being as secure as possible while being similar in complexity to the average messenger.

> But for solutions, can't you just buy a voip number?

No, how would my uncle in the countryside of Vietnam do that? He doesn't have a credit card -- not many here do. He doesn't speak English -- can you find a website that sells voip numbers in Vietnamese? Buying a voip number from a provider in Vietnam has the same exact KYC requirements as buying a SIM, so it is still tied to your government ID and registered forever.

Also buying a VOIP for 1 month costs something like $10 from a quick Google. Average salaries are like $1.50/hour. Nobody is going to pay an entire day's salary to buy an VOIP number they throw for a month just so they can register anonymously for chat.

So, not you can't "just" buy a voip number unless you're a rich Westerner. But who needs privacy more? People in liberal democracies or people in places like Vietnam (literally an authoritarian country where people are routinely imprisoned for speaking against the government)?

> I don't know anyone who buys a phone with cash except international students.

Everyone buys a phone with cash here because few people have credit cards, since there is no such thing as "credit ratings" and it is easy for people to disappear from their debts. There are more people in Vietnam than any country in Europe. We all use smartphones and messenger apps here, too.

Briar ('droid only), SimpleX, and Session; optionally with a cheap VPN like Mullvad or Proton to ameliorate anonymity issues in the p2p voice/video features.

He’d ask you to do it then like every non technical older person. It’s a non issue.

None of my non technical older relatives in Vietnam have asked for anyone's help signing up for the chat accounts they use.

Indeed. Even most technical people don't have experience setting up VOIP stuff. And needing some techie's intervention just to create an account is not beneficial for a company's user base. Calling this a non-issue is being ignorant about how usability works and influences user engagement.

If they needed signal it be because someone like you told them to get it. Non issue for the billions that use WhatsApp and Facebook.

Your uncle in Vietnam has a smartphone, no internet, no number, and NEEDS the signal app? He might need solar, electricity and internet first.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com