Are you talking about the client app, or about the service?
Much of what you said doesn’t apply to the service, which stores hashed phone numbers and first access / last access times and nothing else.
And the client does store these things, but also lets users delete messages and contacts. Your message deletions can propagate as well.
Indeed, I also don’t realize that. Please explain further.
The leak from the administration was because Pete Hegseth included a journalist in a discussion about sensitive war plans. Trying to blame that on Signal is deceptive on your part.
If you are saying that Signal does not offer anonymity then you are right. Anyone I message on there knows it’s me. But Signal is still keeping my messages safe from monitoring and third-party surveillance, to the best of my knowledge.
Be specific: what does Signal divilge about me to outsiders besides “I have used Signal”?
Signal is important to some of my contacts and its E2E encryption is excellent. The only thing the phone number gives away to the outside is “has this person used Signal in the past?”. Since it is not illegal to use Signal in my country, I’m not worried.
Can you use Signal on a Linux phone? I know there’s a desktop Linux client, but it relies on being activated from an Android or iPhone app to function, in my experience.
I’ve been happy not using Amazon since 2010!
For paper books, find a good local bookstore first. Then for online ordering, bookshop is good. B&N is iffy ethically - they helped crush a lot of smaller stores in the 90’s, but they aren’t part of the current tech giant oligarchy either. Target will usually have a section of best-sellers. If you have to buy from a big store, maybe offset it ethically by donating to a library.
For ebooks, Bookshop is good! They point out which of their ebooks have DRM and which don’t. For some cases, you can also buy books directly from the publisher - these basically never have DRM in my experience. I mainly experience this with technical books and tabletop RPG books.
You literally don’t understand how hashing works, got it. Please educate yourself on this topic. In short, “connecting your existing contacts” is ENTIRELY possible with hashed phone numbers; it’s not even complicated or tricky. To claim otherwise, as you just did, is nothing but trumpeting your own ignorance.
As for deleting (and propagating deletion of) messages, this is most definitely NOT a matter of “just trust us”. The client is open-source! We KNOW how it works. We KNOW that deletion propagates across devices when you tell it to. We KNOW that the service cannot see your unencrypted messages, and that the encrypted messages are made with AES so even quantum computers in the future can’t decrypt them. This is incredibly far from “just trust us”.