If signal gets the new username feature, this just might be what i do, so fricking tired of people just blindly giving random apps and websites their contact permissions and they get my contact as well, and there’s nothing i can do about it

  • JubilantJaguar@lemmy.world
    10·
    1 year ago

    Agreed. Phone numbers are now people’s de-facto UIDs. And somehow we collectively decided that Big Tech should have free access to this information to construct giant social graphs and analyze as it sees fit. Crazy sh**.

    So the decline of SMS definitely has a silver lining. If each siloed messaging app uses its own UIDs, and this data stays out of people’s damn contact lists, then in theory this is a privacy win.

    What I worry about is that the OS gatekeepers, i.e. Google and Apple, will contrive to get apps like Signal and Telegram to populate the mobile contact lists with these new IDs. “So you never lose your data”, etc. Then they can keep triangulating the information and we’re back to square one.

    The only failsafe solution is to ban individual users from sharing their friends’ IDs without their consent. Just as the GDPR bans websites from doing exactly the same thing. For that the EU is our only hope as usual.

      • JubilantJaguar@lemmy.world
        11·
        1 year ago

        Ha! So people do audit the edit history! I agree but I also think people swear too much, including me apparently. It’s cheap, it adds nothing, it devalues the language, IMO to drop a fuck or shit or damn is mainly about making the speaker feel better, it does nothing for the reader except undermine the seriousness of whatever they’re reading.

        So asterisks felt like a good compromise, d*** it.

    • Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      3·
      1 year ago

      Thanks for the reminder to remove permissions from Telegram.
      Why the fuck do they need my calling history???