Not if you've selected to hide your number, looks like.

But will the other person really have two distinct chats with me in their list then? One with my username and one with my phone# ?

It depends on whether you want your number to be discoverable. In either case, they'll only have one chat, with your username.

Yeah, so they will indeed be able to link my phone number to my username, even if the number is set to "hidden".

This sounds unfortunate, but I guess there's no way around this as long as Signal insist on keeping phone numbers as primary identifier.

I don't think this is the case.

If you set your privacy to nobody and someone saves your phone number, to them it will appear that you do not have a signal account, even if they start chatting with you via your handle.

How will they be able to link your phone number to your username? They can't do anything with your number unless you choose to.

>How will they be able to link...

By "link" I mean they immediately know what person the username belongs to iff they already had that person's phone number because the chat that is initialized after they scan the QR code is just the old chat being continued.

>not the other way around

Exactly. I think that's important to know before people start giving out their Signal handles left and right because they think they're anonymous now.

Ah, that's what you mean. Yeah, if you want to be anonymous to Signal itself, I don't think that's possible. If you want to be anonymous to people, I think you can delete and recreate your account. I think that might do the trick.