How I Got a Truly Anonymous Signal Account
How I Got a Truly Anonymous Signal Account
Yes, you can use Signal without sharing your personal phone number. Here’s how I did it.
Will just allow account creation without phone numbers already. Or just fucking turn federation back on.
...Signal's never had federation, though. That's been one of the biggest sources of criticism toward Moxie's design decisions for the platform.
This method is great until you need to do something that requires phone verification. Then you need to hope that the payphone still exists.
And that the number on it didn't change... And that it still works... and that signal still offers voice readouts of the verification code... and that nobody else has the same idea and doesn't run into your same payphone (since they're getting rare this is legit a concern)... or that Signal doesn't get a list of payphone numbers somehow and ban them (like these services do with SIP-based numbers)...
This has way more problems then getting a minute phone with cash that you can just keep topped up enough to keep service running.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Unlike many competitors, its default is end-to-end encryption — and on top of that, the app minimizes the amount of information it stores about users.
This makes it a powerful communication tool for those seeking a private and secure means of chatting, whether it’s journalists and their sources, activists and human rights defenders, or just ordinary people who want to evade the rampant data-mining of Big Tech platforms.
On a recent visit to Tampa, where I travel annually to discuss security matters and set things on fire, I spotted a pay phone while leaving Busch Gardens.
If the number isn’t listed on the phone — it wasn’t in this case — there’s a workaround that doesn’t involve a paper trail leading back to your cellphone.
Signal first insists on attempting to send a verification code via an SMS text message, so you have to initially go through that fruitless route.
The next and final step was to set up a PIN and enable a registration lock so that someone else wouldn’t be able to take over the account by going to the same pay phone and registering their own version of Signal with that same number.
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