[jillesvangurp]

"When you use WhatsApp and allow access to your phone book, we only see the phone numbers, not the name."

That's the weakness of current chat tools right there. They can't listen in but they do know when you talked to whom and how long, how often, etc. In fairness, Signal and Telegram are similarly dependent on phone numbers. The traffic might be encrypted but even just knowing who talked to whom, when is useful.

[bellyfullofbac]

Yeah, this was demonstrated greatly in the Navalny/Bellingcat investigation of his poisoning: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smhi6jts97I . They bribed the appropriate providers to get phone call records and could see how the agents would be ringing each other and up the chain of command around the time of certain events. If an "enemy of the state" could do this, imagine what the state, or the owners of the data, could do.

Funny as if saying "just the phone numbers and not the names" should make us feel safe, Facebook already asks for your phone number, and could correlate your data that way.

[em-bee]

i believe signal uses the phones contact list, but telegram manages its own contact list, and i can add telegram contacts contacts without knowing their phone number or adding them to my phone contact list. i can also block my number from being shared with anyone.

the only thing the number is needed for is to create a new account.