Anonymity isn't necessary. e.g. Briar isn't anonymous (you still need to trust your contacts), but it's essentially impossible for third-parties to track who is talking to who and when.
If I would have to be anonymous then I won’t even bother with any phone number. In fact I won’t even bother with Signal or WhatsApp. I’ll find an app or service that is e2ee and doesn’t require a phone number at all.
Because what’s even the general use case of using Signal and WhatsApp (in their current forms)?
Because then it would just be weird talking to friends and family. And with those few people you want to be totally anonymous with? Those apps and services which are already anonymous.
Will be awesome if Signal adds that feature? Yes. But even then I would still ise dedicated anonymous apps.
Signal doesn't allow creating multiple identities for different contexts (without using multiple phones).
And depending on your personal risk profile (e.g. journalists protecting their sources), phone numbers are extremely difficult to acquire anonymously in many countries. In most EU countries, you need to show photo ID to register prepaid SIM cards these days.
You don’t need to acquire a phone number from the country you’re in. Any phone number works on Signal. There’s no long distance.
In EU countries you can easily and anonymously get a US number via the internet that works fine on Signal. There is no requirement that the SIM card in your phone be the number you use to register on Signal, or that the number even be a GSM number.
My Signal number is a Google Voice number, for example. Anyone with access to a US GSM number can create these; many are for sale for anonymous payment methods.
It’s easy to use Signal anonymously in any country that has mostly uncensored internet.
> In EU countries you can easily and anonymously get a US number that works fine on Signal.
How? And even if that's feasible (for many people I'd argue it's too big a hurdle) it still only gets you pseudonymity.
There are some interesting encrypted messaging ideas floating around that allow you to have per-contact or even per-conversation keys or multiple identities for different contexts; Signal is just not doing much in that regard.
