Oh yeah, privacy oriented messaging app requires phone number for sign up. Telegram has this feature for years already? It seems to me that they are positioning themselves as privacy saviours just because they are non-profit organization and their app is open source.
The TL;DR is that they collect and forever store sensitive data in the cloud, meaning that the US gov could almost certainly access that data and any other government could access any one person's data too just by brute forcing a PIN
Maybe in the US you don‘t need to mandatory register a phone number with a valid id, in most of the world you have to. If anyone can require the phone company to reveal your identity, it‘s the government.
