Agreed. It also alerts you with &quot;X is on Signal, say hey!&quot; notifications when someone in your contacts signs up. I&#x27;ve brought this up before on HN and the Signal issue tracker [0] but there&#x27;s been little to no attention paid to it. They also seem to conflate simply using an encrypted messenger with <i>alerting everyone else</i> that you&#x27;re using an encrypted messenger. It&#x27;s the difference between an email client that lets you send a GPG encrypted message and a client that immediately notifies you of every contact with a GPG public key, regardless of whether you&#x27;ve been in contact with them. I understand it can be done, I just don&#x27;t think it should be implemented in the official client everyone uses. It&#x27;s pretty shitty because apart from this issue, it&#x27;s the best in it&#x27;s class of secure mobile messenger. Unfortunately it has friends (and perhaps myself) eager for new entrants for which this isn&#x27;t an issue.<p>I use Ricochet (uses Tor hidden services) on Desktop, which doesn&#x27;t require a phone number or registration, and is metadata-safe, but the limited feature set leaves a bit to be desired.<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;WhisperSystems&#x2F;Signal-Android&#x2F;issues&#x2F;5009" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;WhisperSystems&#x2F;Signal-Android&#x2F;issues&#x2F;5009</a>