this post was submitted on 23 Nov 2025
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Kinda of a poor write up. I have my issues with this but signal doesn't really use phone numbers internally, it uses hashes of phone numbers. It's not as straight forward as this article makes it seem, and this is readily available information that the author could have found.
Hashing doesn't really do anything because there are too few possible phone numbers. Easy to bruteforce. See the researchers who enumerated the WhatsApp users database recently via the internet...
Hold up. They also have profile pictures and other stuff. So Meta offered the option to create a global phone book, but also to create a phone book of children worldwide + a timeline of profile pictures. Meta's statement was that it wasn't a big deal because it was public data... So Meta's pedos dream phone book is something else entirely.