Vitalik: Signal advanced the registration of cell phoneless and genuine privacy requires information-level irrelevance

On 7 August, Vitalik Buterin, a co-founder of the Taifeng, sent a letter welcoming Signal to advance the registration of accounts without a mobile phone number. In his view, reducing reliance on mobile phone numbers would not only be of private value, but would also reduce reliance on oligopolistic access to communications, reduce the risk of SIM changing cards and make it more difficult for the platform to discriminate between users according to the State or to ban its citizens under pressure from the Government. However, Vitalik points out that in an environment where AI is able to efficiently collage a variety of clues, it is difficult to establish a “false name” that delinks a long-term account from the main identity and that metadata such as the timing of the message, the frequency of contacts, the size of the data and the IP address can be progressively exposed. True and defensible privacy should be “the indissociability of information-by-information”, i.e. no one but the sender and the recipient knows the connection between the two parties. He indicated that the long-standing end-to-end encryption provided by Signal had resolved the problem of confidentiality of information content and that registration without a mobile phone had added a pseudonym; further information-level unconnectivity would still require technology such as a hybrid network, and anti-spam information and anti-DoS would be an important challenge in the next phase。