Vitalik: Signal is Exploring Phone Number-Free Registration, True Privacy Requires "Message-by-Message Unlinkability"

BlockBeats News, August 7th, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin posted that Signal recently announced that it is exploring allowing users to register accounts without a phone number. He welcomed this move, believing it will help reduce reliance on the highly oligopolistic telephone number system, lower the identity security risks associated with SIM card swapping, and make it more difficult for governments to pressure Signal to block users based on nationality.

Vitalik also pointed out that while this measure is superior to the current state in terms of privacy protection, it has only achieved "confidentiality" and has not yet achieved true anonymity. This is because message metadata such as sending time, frequency, and recipients could still be used for identity correlation. He believes that with the advancement of artificial intelligence technology, long-term persistent anonymous accounts have become outdated. The only privacy form that is defensible is "messages that cannot be linked to each other," where no one except the sender and receiver knows the identities. This direction is currently being explored and promoted by new communication tools such as Session and SimpleX and mixnet projects. In addition, protecting against spam and denial-of-service attacks will also be the next key issues to address.