[zaik]

> It can even be a virtual/landline/temporary phone number without any SIM cards or cell phones involved.

Then contact discovery would not work, which is the main advantage of collecting the phone number in the first place. How many of your contacts who use Signal used their real phone number?

> XMPP servers are a gold mine when it comes to metadata.

Then even more so for Signal, since metadata for all users can be collected by a single entity. This is not possible in a federated network like XMPP.

[infosechandbook]

> How many of your contacts who use Signal used their real phone number?

Most of them; however, there is no obligation to provide any personal data when registering a SIM card in my country. Even if providing personal data would be mandatory and if we assume that telcom providers track us all the time, then it doesn't mean that this data is accessible to the organization behind an instant messaging service.

> Then even more so for Signal, since metadata for all users can be collected by a single entity. This is not possible in a federated network like XMPP.

This ignores that Signal and XMPP don't process the same amount of metadata in the first place, and the de-facto centralization of the XMPP network (also stated in our article -> the majority of XMPP users only uses a small number of public XMPP instances, and these XMPP instances are hosted by a tiny number of companies in mainly three countries on this planet).

[rakoo]

> Then contact discovery would not work, which is the main advantage of collecting the phone number in the first place.

I believe the real reason Signal requires a phone number is that it is a pretty good anti-spam filter