Oh hey great, I don’t need a phone number anymore, I just need a…Google account and a credit card? That’s so much worse…
Agreed. They should not have tied it into a Google account, literally ruins the whole point of being anonymous on there. I get they needed to implement some sort of easy payment method, but this isn’t it.
Only thing I could think to do is create a burner Google account, buy a Google play card in cash, and add those funds to your burner account to pay the 3 dollars.
This plus their longstanding refusal to implement things like an official FDroid client or UnifiedPush notifications leads me to believe they’re not committed to privacy.
Those are also my two biggest gripes about Signal as well. At least the Molly fork solves both of those issues, that’s what I use.
molly is no longer maintained properly. It’s worse than signal as last molly version is from Jul 31 and last signal is from Sept 11.
i would think twice about using molly as the only benefit over signal is db encryption.
Yeah, I’ve been considering trying to move friends and family to an XMPP server, but there are a couple older folks who will probably make that difficult.
If you’re worried about the payment being tied to your account, Parrelli also explains that the app will use the same zero-knowledge proofs Signal uses for its donation system.
Trust me bro.
This is just a quicker way of de-anonymizing than having to track down how you paid for a phone number. At least you can get a phone number with crypto.
This trust is also needed for sealed sender. It’s fundamentally impossible to make such a system actually anonymous
simplex folks. use simplex.
Why Simplex over Molly?
simplex requires zero identifiable information.
you have to add users to the trust to get access to the channel/dm.
the relay is self-hosted, meaning you have control over where your messages are handled. this means you could run it entirely on an intranet or pipe it through a lora-wan.
personally I run a local instance within my LAN, and another instance in the cloud. both terminate with the same DNS. this means I can have quick very secure chats with family while at home that never leaves my network and when we’re out messages are still going through my infrastructure.
Parrelli explains that Signal is instituting the $3 fee to prevent scammers from creating multiple accounts and flooding the network.
$3 does not seem like nearly enough to prevent this
You can only reach a few people before an account is banned due to reports.
And most people won’t fall for scams.
And you also wanna pay the remaining operation not spend most returns on signal accounts.Because of that there’s a massive difference in the kind of spam you get when it costs cents vs a few bucks per account.
I definitely get more spam on discord than signal for example.3 bucks is also a lot more than it takes in some places to get numbers, so maybe long-term signal will try to also limit those number spaces with a fee? Either way this is enough to keep numbers as the weak link not numberless signups.
You also need to factor in the cost of getting a new phone number. If creating an account without a phone number is significantly more expensive than just buying a burner SIM, it defeats the entire purpose.
Here in Austria, I’ve seen SIM cards for as low as €2.
Looks like before it gets out of beta it will be available in
fuckingwhatsapp.Fucking
