🔐📵 Signal is finally killing the phone number requirement, letting you sign up with a one-time payment instead of SMS ve...

🔐📵 Signal is finally killing the phone number requirement, letting you sign up with a one-time payment instead of SMS verification. This closes real security holes like SIM-swap attacks, which cost victims nearly $26 million in reported losses in 2024 alone.But Ethereum's Vitalik Buterin threw cold water on the celebration. He points out that AI can now identify who you are just from behavioral patterns, message timing, who you talk to, how often, even without ever seeing your phone number or reading a single message. There's already a real attack called "Careless Whisper" that tracks when your phone is active just by timing delivery receipts, no encryption broken, no notification to you.Bottom line: this is a genuine security upgrade, but it's not the privacy fix people are treating it as. Real anonymity means nobody can tell who's talking to who at all, and Signal still isn't built for that.🔗 https://www.techtimes.com/articles/323618/20260808/signal-removes-phone-numbers-ai-identifie...