Privacy

37786 readers

513 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 5 years ago

MODERATORS

189

Why does Signal want a phone number to register if it's supposedly privacy first? (programming.dev)

submitted 3 days ago by 0101100101@programming.dev to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

279 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I remember a time when visiting a website that opens a javacript dialog box asking for your name so the message "hi " could be displayed was baulked at.

Why does signal want a phone number to register? Is there a better alternative?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] rottingleaf@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

But, it sounds to me like more reason to want to self-host.

So do that. You can do that with Signal.

I don’t see any point to rehashing the other stuff. Non-TLS websites mostly went away once DNS spoofing at wifi hotspots became widespread.

Maybe I wasn't clear, someone said that back in the day registration on a website was a new and bad thing, connecting it with privacy and comparing to Signal asking for phone number. I answered with the idea that not much commonly thought from that time about privacy has aged well. You wouldn't register on websites, but you would communicate with them over plaintext. I hope that makes it clearer.

[–] solrize@lemmy.world 1 points 19 hours ago* (last edited 19 hours ago)

So do that. You can do that with Signal.

Do you know of anyone doing it? Other people have said there are difficulties.

You wouldn’t register on websites, but you would communicate with them over plaintext. I hope that makes it clearer.

It is ok, in that era (dialup or wired internet) unencrypted http was basically as secure as unencrypted landlne phone calls. People still have unencrypted phone calls all the time. Typicalally sites would show public content (like product pages on an e-commerce site) by http, then switch to https for checkout to protect stuff like credit card numbers. Encrypting everything became important when wifi became widespread. Wifi hotspots would hijack DNS and spoof entire web sites to steal credentials. Also, LetsEncrypt made it possible to bypass the CA scam industry, making https-everywhere more popular. Public awareness also increased due to Snowden's disclosures.

The RSA encryption patent also expired in 2000. Before that, US website operators were potentially exposed to hassle if they didn't use a commercial server with an RSA license ($$$). But, it didn't apply outside the US and FOSS SSL servers existed for those wanting them.