Things are heating up. Millions of people are taking to the streets against Trump's rising authoritarianism. Communities around the US are organizing to defend against ICE raids, to protest Israeli genocide, for mutual aid, and for other forms of fighting fascism. Signal can help people safely organize in all of
They dropped the phone number requirement a while ago
No, you still need a phone number to sign up. You can now optionally have a username as well, but a phone number remains a hard requirement.
What’s more, they require you to periodically log in on your phone. If you exclusively use the desktop client, you will get a message that access will be blocked if you don’t sign in on your phone.
Sometimes, it feels like a surveillance loophole is left for the OS (remember when they had plain text backups on windows). And Apple, Microsoft, and Google would happily turn over data, while Signal always will have plausible deniability.
And you will always need a smartphone OS built by one of the US companies above to start and continue using signal.