Signal’s New Update: New way of Communicating with ‘Newly added features’
As long as we can remember, cybersecurity experts and privacy advocates have suggested the end-to-end encrypted communications app Signal as the epitome for real private digital communications. Utilizing it, however, has paradoxically needed uncovering one particular piece of private information to everyone you text or call: a phone number. Now, that’s finally switching.
Today, Signal introduced the rollout in beta of a long-awaited set of features it’s explaining simply as “phone number privacy.” Those features, which experts have tried and tested, are designed to enable users to hide their phone numbers as they interact on the app and instead share a username as a less-exposing approach of connecting with one another. Rather than give your phone number to other Signal contacts as the recognizer they use to initiate a conversation with you, in a nutshell, you can now choose to be distinguishable via a desired handle—or even to stop anyone who does have your phone number from finding you on Signal.
The application of phone numbers has long been probably the most constant criticism of Signal’s design. These new privacy protections at last offer a resolution, commented Meredith Whittaker, Signal’s president. “We want to build a communications app that everyone in the world can easily use to connect with anyone else privately.
That ‘privately’ is really in bold, underlined, in italics,” Whittaker adds. “So we’re extremely sympathetic to people who might be using Signal in high-risk environments who say, ‘The phone number is really sensitive information, and I don’t feel comfortable having that disseminated broadly.’”
Introducing usernames and phone number privacy on Signal! We’re making it possible for people to connect with each other without having to share phone numbers. Now launching to beta users, available for everyone soon. https://t.co/YcBEyD1AIA
— Signal (@signalapp) February 20, 2024
In the evolved features—which are available in beta now, but which Signal plans to reveal in the upcoming version in the future weeks—Signal has employed three changes, one setting that’s now switched on by default and two that are opt-in features.
The default setting is that your phone number will no longer appear in your Signal profile unless someone already has the number saved in their phone’s address book. Second, users can now choose to create and share a unique username, or a QR code that contains it, with anyone you want to connect with. For instance, a user is Ramon.02. (Once a user does start messaging you, a little puzzlingly, they’ll see your chosen profile name instead of that username. That profile name, just as before in Signal, doesn’t have to be unique, and the person you’re communicating with can also alter it in their own view of you in the app.)
In fact, designing a system that restricts spam accounts and imports the user’s address book without needing a phone number is “a deceptively hard problem,” added Whittaker. “Spam prevention and actually being able to connect with your social graph on a communications app—those are existential concerns,” she says. “That’s the reason that you still need a phone number to register, because we still need a thing that does that work.”