[ethersteeds]

Your first formulation I agree with:

> privacy was not their objective. Only secure communications was.

> Signal is demonstrably anti-privacy by design.

But your second is uncharitable and misses Signal's historical context.

The value of a phone number for spam prevention has been mentioned, but that's not the original reason why phone numbers were central to Signal. People forget that Signal was initially designed around using SMS as transport, as with Twitter.

Signal began as an SMS client for Android that transparently applied encryption on top of SMS messages when communicating with other Signal users. They added servers and IP backhaul as it grew. Then it got an iOS app, where 3rd party SMS clients aren't allowed. The two clients coexisted awkwardly for years, with Signal iOS as a pure modern messenger and Signal Android as a hybrid SMS client. Finally they ripped out SMS support. Still later they added usernames and communicating without exposing phone numbers to the other party.

You can reasonably disdain still having to expose a phone number to Signal, but calling it "anti-privacy by design" elides the origins of that design. It took a lot of refactoring to get out from under the initial design, just like Twitter in transcending the 140-character limit.

[coppsilgold]

> Signal is demonstrably anti-privacy by design.

> You can reasonably disdain still having to expose a phone number to Signal, but calling it "anti-privacy by design" elides the origins of that design.

They introduced usernames without removing the requirement for phone numbers.

I rest my case.

[hnarn]

Not a very good case made since you obviously didn’t read the parent discussion.

[illiac786]

You’re blatantly trolling, it’s boring man. What do you call SMS if signal is “anti-privacy by design”?