If you don’t care then stop arguing about it. Personally, I care very much about people spreading disinformation.

What is what?

Okay, so you are saying that now…? I honestly don’t know how you expect anyone to take you seriously at this point.

I’m not denying your experience, I’m denying your interpretation of your experience. You don’t get a special version of the app that’s different from ours. They all work the same.

As I explained above, what you may have interpreted as Signal sharing your contact info was actually just Signal notifying all of the people that already have your contact information that you joined the service, using the information those people already have…

I didn’t say that.

…who are you trying to fool? It’s there for everyone to see…?

But since you brought it up:

As I already stated, this is incorrect. It’s not how it works. And after publishing such obviously incorrect information, I wouldn’t trust anything they said.

LOL you did. The title of the link you shared is “signal leaks your phone number to everyone in your contacts”.

Then why did you bring it into the conversation?

Neither. I explained my/our rationale above. Your disinformation is making people unsafe.

Signal does not leak your phone number to anyone. You/they are just ignorant as to how the service works. Signal will notify you if someone YOU HAVE IN YOUR CONTACTS joins the network. It will not give you any of their personal information. Their ID will show up as whatever is already in your contacts.

You made a baseless claim that Signal does not retain the phone numbers

So you’ve run out of personal insults and repetition and are just moving on to blatant lies now…

Do you think if they were giving away extra information in NSLs and witholding that information in public subpoenas that no one would ask questions or hold them accountable for that?

Okay, you’ve sufficiently demonstrated not only that you don’t know what you’re talking about but also that you have no evidence to back it up and your only recourse is repetition and personal insults so I’m gonna call it a night.

Unless you’re in a position to audit what the Signal server does with that data, which you’re not

I don’t have to be. Lots of people, public and private, who are far more knowledgeable than me, already have. You’re assuming they’re doing something nefarious but you have zero evidence to back that up. You’re just spewing nonsense here. The fact that you keep repeating this nonsense over and over isn’t going to make it true baby Goebbels.

The fact that you don’t understand there is no trust, clearly shows who’s actually embarrassing themselves.

Your phone number is an identifying piece of information about the person who is sending and receiving messages. That’s what metadata is.

It’s not. And I’m tired of repeating myself.

The content of the message is the data, the identifying information is metadata

Once again, no one has access to the content of the messages. Ergo, there is no metadata. Maybe spend a bit of time actually learning about the subject instead of trolling here.

The phone number is not associated with your account, it IS your account. In order for there to be metadata, there would have to be other data associated with it, which we’ve already established that there is not.

the phone number is data about the user sending the message

No it isn’t. If someone gets information associated with that phone number, they get it from somewhere else, not Signal. Let me know if you need me to use smaller words to explain this to you.

Signal server has to keep a graph of connections between the accounts in order to route messages between them.

No it doesn’t. You’re making it very clear that have absolutely no clue regarding the subject you’re attempting to debate here.

No, my entire argument is based on basic security practices that anybody who’s ever dealt with security would understand.

No it isn’t. Please stop embarrassing yourself.

What part of “there is zero data associated with your phone number” are you struggling to understand, specifically?

It is not based on trust. It’s called “zero knowledge encryption” for a reason. You don’t have to trust them, because you give them nothing to trust them with.

How about literally any form of evidence?

Metadata is understood to be data that’s associated with messages being sent

That’s incorrect. Metadata is literally “data about the data”. There is not data associated with the phone number (data). The fact that you don’t even understand this shows that you have no business making uninformed comments on this subject.

One has to be an incredibly gullible individual to actually believe this.

No, one just needs a rudimentary understanding of how encryption works. Actually looking at the subpoenas sent from Signal is helpful, though.

Anybody with a functioning brain can understand that this graph is highly valuable to intelligence agencies in the US

Anybody who actually pays attention can see that there is no graph. A graph has interconnected points. There are no connections in Signal.

Your entire argument is based on wild hypotheticals and conspiracy theories and you have zero evidence of anything nefarious, or you would have provided it already.

Thank you for continuing to not put forward any sort of legitimate retort and responding only with insults instead. Super helpful.

I would encourage you to think critically about the nonsense being shared here. Do some research and read about people who actually know things about security and you’ll find a common pattern: basically all of them hold Signal up as a gold standard in privacy and security.