They use the phone to do their person vetting. It helps reduce bots because you have to have phone numbers[0]. It's not perfect but it does create a barrier to entry. That's unfortunately how security works, there's nothing impenetrable, there are only things that make certain things harder. The best security is where something is impracticable, not impossible (e.g. brute forcing a large password is not impossible, but it is impracticable). But at the same time you run into problems like that.
[0] They also use it as a means to help with the social graph. Building a social graph is pretty difficult and you don't want to do it completely from scratch. This is the same reason social media wants you to import your phone contacts and email contacts. The difference is that the "side benefit" to that is that they get data harvesting rather than security.
| > We're unable to provide a specific timeline.
> I'm not sure if it's true, but it feels a bit suspect.
It's because Signal doesn't track metadata. The reason they can't tell you a specific date is that they don't know how to associate your physical name with your Signal account. The information is unavailable to them! Which is the whole point of Signal.
Honestly, the best solution to this would have been to buy a cheap phone or something like a VOIP number. I don't know your situation but it seems like it is not that easy to go a year without a phone number. I definitely think Signal should do better in this but I don't think the result is unreasonable. It brings up an edge case they probably didn't consider but having a phone number "abandoned" for a year sounds like it is a very low probability situation. Being reliant on phone numbers they also have to garbage collect, right? Because a phone number is not a unique identification to a person for their life. So while I do agree your situation sucks and is very frustrating I hope you can recognize that it is (from my best guess) a very unlikely situation. That the phone number is being sat on but unused and that the squatting is happening by a legitimate person rather than a scammer.
They can do better, for sure, but I don't think I'd judge a platform harshly by the results of an extremely odd outlier situation.
[0] They also use it as a means to help with the social graph. Building a social graph is pretty difficult and you don't want to do it completely from scratch. This is the same reason social media wants you to import your phone contacts and email contacts. The difference is that the "side benefit" to that is that they get data harvesting rather than security.
It's because Signal doesn't track metadata. The reason they can't tell you a specific date is that they don't know how to associate your physical name with your Signal account. The information is unavailable to them! Which is the whole point of Signal.Honestly, the best solution to this would have been to buy a cheap phone or something like a VOIP number. I don't know your situation but it seems like it is not that easy to go a year without a phone number. I definitely think Signal should do better in this but I don't think the result is unreasonable. It brings up an edge case they probably didn't consider but having a phone number "abandoned" for a year sounds like it is a very low probability situation. Being reliant on phone numbers they also have to garbage collect, right? Because a phone number is not a unique identification to a person for their life. So while I do agree your situation sucks and is very frustrating I hope you can recognize that it is (from my best guess) a very unlikely situation. That the phone number is being sat on but unused and that the squatting is happening by a legitimate person rather than a scammer.
They can do better, for sure, but I don't think I'd judge a platform harshly by the results of an extremely odd outlier situation.