Your profile, like everything else on Signal, is also end-to-end encrypted. Your name and profile picture do get shared with whoever you chat with, groups or individuals. If you don’t want your name and profile picture shared with randos, either don’t set them or don’t chat with randos.
But they must still have your phone number and associate it with your username. So it would still be easy for a government organization to force Signal to give up the identities of all people who join a group.
Really? That’s interesting. But the group membership list must be persisted somewhere, no? Otherwise, you wouldn’t know where to send and receive messages. So where is it persisted then?
And also, how would you add someone to a group? When you add a new user to a group, would he be able to view all previous messages? Is it possible for this to scale to, say, a thousand or a million users?
Signal defaults to hiding your phone number since the release of user names: https://signal.org/blog/phone-number-privacy-usernames/
Not worried about my phone number, I’m more worried about my profile.
Your profile, like everything else on Signal, is also end-to-end encrypted. Your name and profile picture do get shared with whoever you chat with, groups or individuals. If you don’t want your name and profile picture shared with randos, either don’t set them or don’t chat with randos.
That’s fine if one of those ends isn’t a public activism group.
I use Signal to talk to people in real life, both personally and professionally. I don’t want to message them from some sort of unidentifiable alias.
That was my point, thank you.
But they must still have your phone number and associate it with your username. So it would still be easy for a government organization to force Signal to give up the identities of all people who join a group.
Wrong. Signal servers don’t know of group members.
Really? That’s interesting. But the group membership list must be persisted somewhere, no? Otherwise, you wouldn’t know where to send and receive messages. So where is it persisted then?
And also, how would you add someone to a group? When you add a new user to a group, would he be able to view all previous messages? Is it possible for this to scale to, say, a thousand or a million users?
https://signal.org/blog/signal-private-group-system/
They can’t get your username from your phone number (but they can b’get your phone number from your username)