This isn’t the first time he has come out in support of privacy and I really don’t understand it.

I don’t think there are any. They all suck.

Oh yeah, if it’s 1-1 personal stuff I tell them to message me on Signal and I don’t reply to anything else.

Usually when I propose these things IRL I’m met with laughter and “who cares?”. I don’t even try anymore.

There are plenty of potential alternatives in such a wild scenario.

Like they went and investigated you to find out what your work email is and then applied it to your profile without your consent?

Plenty of services encrypt metadata. You need to do more research.

This is false. They cannot turn over any type of data that is encrypted. Metadata or otherwise. That’s the point of encryption.

Its true but they also aren’t accounting for people actively trying to prevent that. Like someone else said below, dedicated email, dedicated phone number, use containers in your browser, use a work profile on your phone, etc. It may raise red flags somewhere but it is what it is.

But if I made a temporary email for this purpose, I feel I might get blacklisted.

Make a temporary email on a private domain?

LinkedIn@koulib.com

It never was encrypted. If it was they wouldn’t have anything to turn over.

They still require a phone number to sign up

Yes, that is well documented at this point. What I’m waiting for you to explain is how this compromises your privacy or security.

and its a US domiciled company (5-eyes country), so its inherently unsafe

The 5 eyes is an international data-sharing agreement. They cannot share what they do not have. So no, it’s not.

The obama administration issued an average of 60 national security letters every single day of his administration.

I don’t doubt it. Those NSLs would have returned zero information from Signal because, as Signal has repeatedly demonstrated, and I have repeatedly stated, they don’t have any information to share.

then why do you have to “trust” signal to not do that?

I don’t have to. As I’ve explained several times now, there is nothing to trust them with. I give them a phone number. I give them zero information along with it. Not my name, email, birthdate, nothing.

If you have any actual evidence to share, or any kind of argument I haven’t already debunked I’m all ears, but it sounds like your entire argument is predicated on conspiracy theory, which I’m not interested in entertaining further.

No phone number necessary (anymore).

https://signal.me/#eu/62su5fsZZ63Lr0MlnpgAo7hyVt5Mz1JpO6tKBbadGCLEQJgzLdNAW5LDArwDZKvX

I don’t understand what that has to do with anything. Yes, you can learn all kinds of information about you but you cannot learn it from Signal…

Yes, your phone number is tied to your identity but it’s completely useless without any additional information. Your phone number is not supposed to be a secret. Every chat platform has some sort of unique identifier, other than SimpleX.

That’s true but they didn’t say anything about that.

Signal is hosted on cloud infrastructure around the world.

Signal is centralised meaning its vulnerable to censorship

…what? How do you figure? Signal has attempted to be censored several times but you can just switch relays.

if your contacts are compromised then your conversations can easily be linked back to you and your contacts all be correlated

…how do you suppose that works?

If you don’t care then stop arguing about it. Personally, I care very much about people spreading disinformation.

What is what?