signal requires a phone number to sign up. a phone number could be used to trace your signal account back to you. so why do people, especially privacy enthusiasts and experts (like edward snowden), still use it and endorse it when it lacks anonymity in that sense? i get that people could use a voip number or something to sign up, but still.
Not necessarily. If your high school nemesis steals an encrypted disk that belongs to you, the data is private (for your eyes only) but definitely not anonymous, and it’s not with someone you would trust.
Same thing goes with Signal. We trust the platform because the encryption happens before messages leave your device, and the decryption happens only after they are received on someone else’s. If this becomes provably untrue, then the client apps have become compromised… And at that point, privacy, anonymity, etc all go out the window. Who knows what the apps are doing.