Privacy

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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.

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Signal’s New Usernames Help Keep the Cops Out of Your Data (theintercept.com)

submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I understand that right now LEA can serve up a subpoena and give Signal a username and get a phone number, but they can't give them a phone number and get a username.

Is it also possible for Signal to keep track of past usernames/associated hashes for a particular phone number?

(For comparison, Signal could record IP addresses, but we trust they don't due to unsealed cases. Could they keep a username history?)

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago

Yes it entirely depends on whether they store previously used usernames along with the date range it was in use (to tell apart multiple people who used the same username at different times)

We'll have to see if any unsealed cases in the future support that they don't keep those records like how they don't keep IP logs, but personally their track record is enough for me to have confidence in the feature, especially since my "threat model" is primarily opportunistic hackers or spearphishers at most, not police or state / nation state level actors.