Vitalik Praises Signal's Phone-Number-Free Accounts, Says Privacy Still Falls Short
Ethereum (CRYPTO: $ETH) co-founder Vitalik Buterin has welcomed Signal's move toward optional phone-number-free accounts, but argued that it will not solve the broader privacy problem.
In a Friday post on X, Buterin said removing the phone number requirement would reduce reliance on telecom providers, lower the risk posed by SIM-swapping attacks, and make it harder for governments to pressure the messaging platform into restricting users based on their country.
However, he said persistent pseudonymous identities are becoming harder to protect as metadata and AI tools can allow bad actors to connect digital activity to real people.
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"The only defensible form of privacy is *message-by-message unlinkability* - no one except sender and receiver knows the (sender, receiver) pair, ideally even not knowing who the sender or the receiver are," Buterin wrote, adding that an outside observer should not be able to identify the sender or the recipient of a message.
A 2022 study led by researchers at Imperial College London found that even if your real identity isn't attached to your account, patterns like who you message, when you message, how often, and other metadata can eventually reveal who you are.
Last week, Signal announced that it is adding support for accounts that can be created without a phone number. To offer this feature, the company is bringing changes to registration security, account management, regional information handling, and phone number-related functions.
Notably, accounts created without a phone number would not later be able to add one, while existing phone-number-based accounts would not be able to remove their numbers. This suggests that phone-number-free accounts could be separate from traditional Signal accounts.
Signal is a privacy-focused messaging platform that provides end-to-end encrypted messaging. It was created in 2014 by cryptographer Moxie Marlinspike.
