[enriquto]

> What is the impact of someone who has your phone number knowing you are available over Signal?

Don't know about Signal, but Whatsapp does the same thing (advertise to your contacts that you have a whatsapp account) and I find it extremely offensive.

Context: I am an ardent anti-whatsapp activist, thus I don't have a whatsapp account. This activism has created quite a stir in my family and made a lot of people angry, yet I stick about it. I have forced many of my close family and friends to use a different communication channel with me, and I have lost the contact of quite a few acquaintances. When my dad died a few months ago, her wife needed to talk to me (and I needed to talk to her quite a lot). She was not really in the mood for listening to my techno-activism platitudes, and I was not in the mood to perform them, so I had to open a whatsapp account. Since all the people who I had forced to stop using whatsapp to talk to me would have felt alienated by this at this point, I needed to take a new phone number to talk to my stepmom via whatsapp.

This is a concrete example of why advertising the fact that I have a whatsapp account is an extremely annoying anti-feature. I'm sure there are similarly legitimate reasons for disliking the same feature in Signal. In any case, for a platform that has the privacy of users as one of its main tenets, this is a clear-cut case of anti-privacy feature. I can imagine reasonable people avoiding Signal precisely for this.