The latest Signal beta will let you register for a Signal account without a phone number as long as you're okay paying a one-time fee.

  • Signal’s new beta introduces numberless registration for new users.

  • It costs a one-time fee of $3, which is paid anonymously and not linked to your Signal account.

  • It also adds support for two-factor authentication for numberless accounts.

  • Sandbar_Trekker@piefed.zipEnglish
    2·
    23 hours ago

    TL/DR: You can read about it in detail here: https://eprint.iacr.org/2019/1416.pdf

    According to PrivacyGuides, regarding this announcement:

    The payment uses the same zero-knowledge proofs as Signal’s donation system, so they won’t be able to correlate your payment info to you.

    According to Signal’s support article:

    Is my payment information linked to my Signal account?

    No. Your payment information is not associated with your Signal account. Using the anonymous credential scheme that we introduced for Signal private groups, clients make payments and then associate a badge to their profile such that the server can authenticate the client is in the set of people who made a payment, but doesn’t know specifically which payment it corresponds to.

    • kbal@fedia.io
      1·
      23 hours ago

      You can read about it in detail here

      Not exactly it seems, but we can read there about something which is apparently related to it in some way. If I ever manage to figure out which 3 of the 58 pages of mathematics paper it would take to explain the basic flow of the protocol, maybe it will become clear.