Comment on Time to get serious with E2E encrypted messaging

• Ulrich@feddit.org ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  How do you even exist without a phone number. How do you get cellular data? Does the government not require you to have one? Your employer? What about all the services that require one?

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  • fangleone2526@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    To be clear, I have a phone number, but I do not WANT to have one. Most aspects of my life I have removed my phone number from. There are still a few services ( like signal! ) which requires one, and I cope. Cellular data is also something worth avoiding, from a privacy perspective. It is very possible to live a life where you’re never very far from wifi, especially in a city. I do not currently do this, but would love to one day.

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    • Petter1@lemm.ee ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      How is public wifi more secure than mobile internet?

      For both, you need minimum a VPN connection outha there (to your home ideally, where you are in control of filters etc.) to get some privacy.

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      • fangleone2526@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

        Mobile data you pay a service provider for and link all of your information to ( address, name, etc ), and can be used by one company to track your location at any time with very high accuracy as long as you are near 3 cell towers. Public wifi gets no information about you other than your MAC address and that you’re currently within it’s range. There is no central body that can track all your movements. You could, theoretically, buy prepaid data plans to minimize the info they know about you, but then you have to buy a new one each month, and there’s STILL one company tracking all your movements each month, though they don’t really know who YOU are. They could still do traffic analysis to figure that out.

        It’s not that it’s less secure, it’s that it’s worse for privacy.

        Also, messaging over SMS / MMS is awful for security, which I lump in with the rest of this conversation. youtu.be/wVyu7NB7W6Y

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• Telorand@reddthat.com ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  I have to wonder if you could use a burner number and just disable it after setting up your username

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  • mipadaitu@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    I think you’d have a theoretical issue if the next person who got that number also tried to set up a signal account.

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    • Telorand@reddthat.com ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      You might be right. I’ll have to go double check, but I don’t think that you can just set up a new account with the same number without the password you set up.

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      • EngineerGaming@feddit.nl ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

        You can enable a registration lock, where anyone with your number would have to enter a pin to register an account with it. However, it removes itself if you don’t log in for a while.

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