Very welcome recent news from Signal: they are working on letting you register an account without a phone number. aboutsignal.com/news/signal-… That said, an important counterpoint about what this would and would not accomplish. The good #1: reducing dependence on phone numbers. Even aside from privacy benefits, reducing dependency on a highly oligopolistic system of chokepoints is good in itself. The good #2: phone numbers are for many people not a good "root" of identity from an access control perspective. Phone numbers get sim swapped all the time. The good #3: allowing phone-number-free accounts will make it harder for them in the future to discriminate against people by country - and so make it harder for governments to pressure them to block their own citizens. Now, on privacy. Significantly better than status quo, so yes it is good #4, but... In practice, in 2026, I believe that pseudonymity (a long-term persistent account that is not tied to your primary identity) is a dead concept. There are just too many channels by which we accidentally slowly leak data about who we are - timing of messages, the pattern of who we send messages to with what frequency, size, etc. And too many highly effective AI-based means (both using LLMs per-user, and LLMs helping every person and agency under the sun use math that we had all along) to uncover and piece together those hints. As a trivial example, whatever server you interact with learns your IP address, but even if you hide *that* with a VPN or Tor, there are many other identity leakage vectors. And so the only defensible form of privacy is *message-by-message unlinkability* - no one except sender and receiver knows the (sender, receiver) pair, ideally even not knowing who the sender or the receiver are. A natural taxonomy of privacy is the following 2x2: * Sitting duck: adversary knows "X did Y" * Confidentiality: adversary knows "X did ???" [E2E encryption provides this] * Anonymity: adversary knows "??? did Y" [aka message-by-message unlinkability] * Ideal: adversary knows "??? did ???" Signal has already had confidentiality for a long time. (Note: in other contexts, "confidentiality" sometimes means "someone knows X did Y, and we trust that someone to not reveal it", ie. not true privacy. Here, by confidentiality we mean hiding contents from third parties) This adds pseudonymity: in the above schema, adversary knows "0x8b512c... did Y", where they don't initially know who 0x8b512c... is, but may figure that out over time. The ideal is getting to message-by-message unlinkability. Actually accomplishing that gets into territory that is currently being explored by mixnet projects as well as newer messengers, eg. @session_app and @SimpleXChat. Once we get deeper into this territory, I suspect the primary frontier will be spam and DoS protection. Right now, much of the internet blocks all Tor exit nodes - not because they personally hate privacy, but because that's where DoS attacks come from. So we need ways for people to prove their non-spammer status while maintaining message-by-message unlinkability. See here github.com/dmarzzz/reputatio… for one direction (which complements ethresear.ch/t/zk-api-usage-… nicely). So I hope that we appreciate the victory that is mainstreaming of end-to-end encryption, that we actually get Signal accounts without phone number dependency (it's a great thing even if it had zero privacy consequences), and then that we keep moving forward and pushing the frontier of data leakage minimization.

Signal, WhatsApp, Telegram & iMessage all have serious security problems: > Signal makes it easy for hackers to steal your account by requiring your number. They had a hack last year. > WhatsApp let anyone grab 3.5 billion phone numbers in a hack last year. > Telegram doesn’t encrypt most chats by default — their servers can read them. > iMessage lets Apple see your messages if they’re backed up to iCloud. XChat is the only secure encrypted messaging app.

4,000 Exit Relays. The Anyone Network is now categorically the largest onion routing network globally by exit relays, a huge milestone for our community.