this post was submitted on 20 Mar 2026
122 points (89.6% liked)
Privacy
48009 readers
850 users here now
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don't promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
founded 6 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Signal does have your phone number, which is a problem.
On the other hand, the only information linked to that phone number is, "the person with this phone number uses signal". AFAIK your phone number is not linked to your contacts, your message content, etc.
So in practice, the fact that Signal has your phone number is probably only a problem insofar as you don't want anybody to know that you use Signal.
But to be fair, why have that issue if you don't have to. Signal is actually good, still, but there are even better alternatives.
Well, it’s 100% linked to your contacts in one way or another because when you install it Signal will happily alert you to which ones of your contacts are already using Signal. I can’t see how they could manage that without slurping up your contact information.
AFAIK the client slurps up your contacts, but the E2E encryption ensures that the Signal server cannot actually see those.