> . Phone numbers are how mobile phones are usually identified, and to ask a mobile messaging app to use something else for identification is, to put it bluntly, quite silly.
I disagree it's silly.
> There's nothing in the protocol that forces anyone to use phone numbers as identifier
I'm aware. But there's also no alternative to phone number now. So my point stands until this changes.
> Merely using a pseudonym instead of your phone number as an identifier is going to do exactly nothing to prevent any of the things you mentioned
Yes it does if the pseudonym can not be connected to me. That requires other security/privacy measures but phone numbers prevent that.
> No one claimed that WhatsApp is doing any of that.
If you say something is great for privacy but don't include the asterisks it's misleading.
> I'd argue that they wouldn't have been able to reach critical mass without phone number-based contact discovery.
No one has proven it either way. I can't be certain they would've been successful, you can't they wouldn't. But I do submit as evidence of my hypothesis that several social networks were successful on mobile without it (e.g. Twitter, Instagram and Facebook).
> But I do submit as evidence of my hypothesis that several social networks were successful on mobile without it (e.g. Twitter, Instagram and Facebook).
All of those examples use phone numbers as (at the very least) a secondary contact discovery mechanism on mobile. All but Instagram had existing user bases when they went into the mobile market. None of them are primarily a messaging app.
Do you have an example of a popular mobile messaging app without phone number-based contact discovery?
WeChat has over 650 million users, mostly in China. Quoting Wikipedia: "WeChat allows people to add friends by a variety of methods, including searching by username or phone number, adding from phone or email contacts [...]"
I disagree it's silly.
> There's nothing in the protocol that forces anyone to use phone numbers as identifier
I'm aware. But there's also no alternative to phone number now. So my point stands until this changes.
> Merely using a pseudonym instead of your phone number as an identifier is going to do exactly nothing to prevent any of the things you mentioned
Yes it does if the pseudonym can not be connected to me. That requires other security/privacy measures but phone numbers prevent that.
> No one claimed that WhatsApp is doing any of that.
If you say something is great for privacy but don't include the asterisks it's misleading.
> I'd argue that they wouldn't have been able to reach critical mass without phone number-based contact discovery.
No one has proven it either way. I can't be certain they would've been successful, you can't they wouldn't. But I do submit as evidence of my hypothesis that several social networks were successful on mobile without it (e.g. Twitter, Instagram and Facebook).