As soon as you take away a hard link to a real-life identifier, the sketchy people come out of the woodwork and spread images of child exploitation.
Signal has not had this problem like some platforms (e.g. Kik), and I suspect two reasons:
Lack of searchable chat rooms
Concrete link to a phone number that anyone who contacts you must know (and make it easy to identify you to authorities)
Up until now signal has been an excellent secure replacement for text messaging between parties that know each other. I hope they don’t go the “chat groups” route, though I doubt they will. But I suspect this change will make it a preferred way for abusers to exchange images and videos nearly anonymously.
Their blog post says explicitly that phone number is still required for sign-up and that usernames are purely meant as an avenue to message new people without sharing your phone number. Your username isn’t even visible to anyone but you and you can change it whenever you want.
That does help. While It adds an extra step to the reporting process (having the authorities identify the human behind the tag), it does at least nearly guarantee someone can figure out who is behind it.
Really rather important feature in places like here in Finland, where your phone number (and car license plate) is directly linked and publicly searchable to your full name and address :)
I think this all comes down to how you separate the medium of communication and the content. Nobody cares that you can send encrypted emails between people on any server in the world. Or place encrypted files on any number on free cloud storage solutions. End to end encrypted communication between anonymous parties is fairly easily achieved if you just think about it a little. We don’t hold those systems liable for the content they transmit unknowingly, either legally or in public opinion.
Why is it different for chat services? Have we just become conditioned because Facebook, Twitter, etc decided they needed to police their networks?
I see this as both a win and a problem:
As soon as you take away a hard link to a real-life identifier, the sketchy people come out of the woodwork and spread images of child exploitation.
Signal has not had this problem like some platforms (e.g. Kik), and I suspect two reasons:
Up until now signal has been an excellent secure replacement for text messaging between parties that know each other. I hope they don’t go the “chat groups” route, though I doubt they will. But I suspect this change will make it a preferred way for abusers to exchange images and videos nearly anonymously.
The implication is that a phone number is still required, you just no longer have to share that with the people you communicate with.
Their blog post says explicitly that phone number is still required for sign-up and that usernames are purely meant as an avenue to message new people without sharing your phone number. Your username isn’t even visible to anyone but you and you can change it whenever you want.
That does help. While It adds an extra step to the reporting process (having the authorities identify the human behind the tag), it does at least nearly guarantee someone can figure out who is behind it.
it’s called “phone number privacy.”
Really rather important feature in places like here in Finland, where your phone number (and car license plate) is directly linked and publicly searchable to your full name and address :)
I think this all comes down to how you separate the medium of communication and the content. Nobody cares that you can send encrypted emails between people on any server in the world. Or place encrypted files on any number on free cloud storage solutions. End to end encrypted communication between anonymous parties is fairly easily achieved if you just think about it a little. We don’t hold those systems liable for the content they transmit unknowingly, either legally or in public opinion.
Why is it different for chat services? Have we just become conditioned because Facebook, Twitter, etc decided they needed to police their networks?