I forgot to make sure my responses also went to the mailing list, sorry;
this is the aforementioned elaboration to Stephen.
Hello Stephen,
I am having a hard time seeing the value in this.
OWS does't have identity data paired with your phone number, and anyone
with your phone number can already contact you via SMS. So making the
1. Anyone can see that this phone number is in service and uses Signal,
but not who owns the number.
2. People who know your phone number can see that you use Signal.
Could you elaborate more on why you care about the release of that
information?
Thanks for your elaboration, I didn't make what I'm trying to achieve
clear at all. What's below is just my motivation, not necessarily a request
to add such features verbatim -- although I would of course be happy should
something like these appear.
You are right that, in principle, anyone who is my number can attempt to
text me, and you are correct I shouldn't have as a primary goal to prevent
that; contacts filtering really only a derivative goal. So here are my
1. For me personally, way too many people (some 3.5k) have my
work/personal number through the corporate directory, which is synced to
work phones. I'm happy for my colleagues to contact me during business
hours. But the off-hours messages were really eating into my family life,
so I've arranged it so that office mail/text messages/calls are blocked
outside office hours. For mail, this is done easily enough by just
disabling account sync for the exchange account; for SMS/calls, I have a
filtering app that suppresses notifications for contacts grouped into a
particular contact group (all my office contacts). This is done with a
combination of Tasker and RCB, which I acknowledge makes me a
non-mainstream android user.
2. For my daughter, the same filtering app (RCB) not only suppresses
the notifications but silently deletes text messages from numbers that
don't appear in a contact group I've set up as a whitelist.
I know 2) is easily subverted in a technical sense, but it's sufficient
for my purposes.
So I'm not really looking for contacts filtering perse, I just figured if
I could do contacts filtering, I would be sort of halfway to where I really
want to be. If I can't filter what gets through, not having people know I
use signal sort of achieves the same. I've tried to set up XPrivacy to
achieve the same outcome, but its contact whitelisting feature is rather
hit-and-miss. I was actually considering baking these features into a fork
of Signal, which I intended to put on the Play Store for free; a few
parents at my daughters' school have shown interest, and I don't want them
ticking "unknown sources". But the discussion on the LibreSignal tracker
<https://github.com/LibreSignal/LibreSignal/issues/37#issuecomment-217211165> makes
me think this would be unwelcome, so I'm looking at alternative ways.
which is a lot more popular than Wire. But I'd trust Moxie's work over any