Protecting your Number in a Private App from Dissemination: Meredith Whittaker, CIO, Senior Product Manager, Signal, WIRED
The use of phone numbers has long been perhaps the most persistent criticism of Signal’s design. These new privacy protections finally offer a fix, says Meredith Whittaker, Signal’s president. We want to build a communications app that everyone can use to communicate with each other privately. That ‘privately’ is really in bold, underlined, in italics,” Whittaker tells WIRED. People who might be using Signal in high-risk environments who say they do not want to have that information disseminated broadly are very sympathetic.
The app will also start hiding your phone number by default if users don’t already have it saved in their phone. You can always change this by heading to your settings and selecting Privacy > Phone Number > Who can see my number. If you have the regular version of the app, you will be able to view these features, but only in the alpha version.