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[–] 63 points 1 month ago (1 child)

The registration is only available on Android for now and costs a one-time fee of $2.99. The fee is meant to make it financially infeasible for spammers to create thousands of accounts and ruin Signal's network.

The payment is currently only offered through Play Services, but more payment methods are planned for the future. This means that users who don't have Play Services, such as people running GrapheneOS without Sandboxed Google Play, won't be able to try the feature out just yet.

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  • [–] 31 points 1 month ago (10 children)
  • [–] 43 points 1 month ago* (3 children)

    I'll happily pay when they accept either crypto or an envelope of cash. There is no way to separate electronic payments or transfers from my personal identity and I don't consider it usefully "private" to have any account directly traceable to that. Trust is a limited and increasingly valuable commodity, and I'm conserving mine.

    That said, there's probably a decent opportunity for second hand, no-strings-attached accounts to now be legitimately purchased then laundered anonymously through an arbitrary middleman without having use burner accounts stolen from innocent people or created with stolen identities. So maybe that'll be an improvement for privacy. Privacy shouldn't have to be illegal or inconvenient (but of course they want it to be).

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  • [–] 0 points 1 month ago (2 children)

    It really isn't that hard to create an anonymous Google account and add some credit or use prepaid cards.

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  • [–] 23 points 1 month ago (5 children)
  • [–] 16 points 1 month ago (4 children)

    My card is ready! When I can on graphene

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  • [–] 17 points 1 month ago (3 children)

    … users who don't have Play Services, such as people running GrapheneOS without Sandboxed Google Play, won't be able to try the feature out just yet.

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  • [–] 9 points 1 month ago

    How about an open source server implementation? How about federation of servers? This fixes nothing. I'm still on XMPP.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 month ago

    Awesome. Tested and works great.

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  • [–] 0 points 1 month ago

    All you need is a major credit card and Google Play. Privacy is secured.

    Threema ftw

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  • 3 comments in c/tech@piefed.world view that post
    [–] 8 points 1 month ago

    The payment is currently only offered through Play Services, but more payment methods are planned for the future. This means that users who don't have Play Services, such as people running GrapheneOS without Sandboxed Google Play, won't be able to try the feature out just yet.

    The payment uses the same zero-knowledge proofs as Signal's donation system, so they won't be able to correlate your payment info to you.

    Really disappointing that privacyguides just repeats the information in the press release without any commentary on the privacy implications of using Play Services to pay for the service, and how ZKP does nothing to prevent law enforcement from tying a Signal account to a real identity by correlating the account creation timestamp (which Signal provides to law enforcement with a warrant).

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  • [–] 6 points 1 month ago

    The registration is only available on Android for now and costs a one-time fee of $2.99. The fee is meant to make it financially infeasible for spammers to create thousands of accounts and ruin Signal's network.

    The payment is currently only offered through Play Services, but more payment methods are planned for the future. This means that users who don't have Play Services, such as people running GrapheneOS without Sandboxed Google Play, won't be able to try the feature out just yet.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 month ago*

    I don’t think I have placed or answered a actual phone call in a couple of years, most places I would previously call force you on to chat bots these days, guess it makes sense to move away from having phone numbers

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