 Signal Messenger recently added a new feature that people have been asking for for years and years now, user names in the Signal app. Now at this moment, the feature is only available in the beta version of the app. So if you want to test this feature out for yourself, just download Signal beta with these instructions and then sign in or sign up for a signal account in that beta app and then you'll have the option to set a username available to you. Now some people are criticizing this update saying that it's useless because Signal is still requiring you to give them a phone number for you to sign up to the platform. Basically you give them your phone number, they text you, I think it's a six digit code and then that's how you verify yourself to get in. So if we're not replacing phone numbers with user names completely then this update is kind of pointless, right? Well it's not, I'm going to explain to you and also demonstrate to you why that's not the case. So there's already been a few instances where federal law enforcement has subpoenaed Signal and they've asked for all of the data that Signal has on a particular person, on a particular person's phone number to be more precise, okay? They want to know everything they've got about them and this is what Signal responds with. It's pretty much their canned response that hey we're an encrypted messaging app or open source, we're not trying to harvest people's data or do anything spooky here. So all we've got is the bare minimum that's required for an app like this to function which of course is the phone number of the person, right? That's actually what their account number is because your signal account if you want to call it that is essentially linked to your phone number and then they've got the date that your account was created. So when you signed up to Signal and then they've also got a timestamp for when you last connected to one of Signal's servers. Now personally I don't think this data would be that helpful to the feds. They clearly already know your phone number because they need that to subpoena Signal like that's the only way Signal can look up your account number and they could work with your cell carrier or they could even work with your ISP directly to figure out when you last connected to Signal's servers without them ever actually subpoenaing Signal unless you're only ever using Signal over Tor or VPN or something like that to mask who you're connecting to. But regardless of that, Signal can only respond to the subpoena if the feds already have your phone number and so the only extra information that Signal can really give the feds or whoever is forcing them to give them this information is the account creation date and when you last connected which might corroborate a timeline of events that maybe the feds are putting together but if that's the case and they've already got your phone number you probably got bigger things to worry about. So what this update is really about is hiding your phone number from other people that are inside of the Signal app which is a much needed feature for the direction that Signal is going in. So you see I've been using Signal for a while now back when you could make it your default SMS app and send regular SMS messages through it but back then Signal was basically just an open source encrypted SMS app but in recent years it started becoming more of like almost an encrypted social media like messaging app hybrid sort of like telegram and it's things like the groups and stories and stickers and now usernames which are really making this the case you know it's not just a texting app anymore for people who already have your phone number and personally I think this is a really great feature because a lot of people have online friends these days that they want to keep in touch with but they don't necessarily want to tell them their personal phone number so maybe they'll add each other on Instagram or you know Snapchat or something else like that or let's say you just met someone and you're not so sure that you want to give them your real phone number yet you know maybe it's like a first date and you're not sure if the person's crazy again that's an instance where you might want to give them like your Instagram or your Snapchat so that you can stay in touch with this person but they don't have something as personal as a phone number well now you could just give them your signal username and you're like hey let's stay in touch over Signal so that you know you're not actually using a data harvesting app like Instagram or Snapchat so anyway let's get into how this works of course this is only available in Signal beta right now which is available in the well you can add it to Ubuntu's repository and install it fairly easily that way so that's where I have it installed right now in an Ubuntu virtual machine so on Signal desktop you can click on this gear icon here for settings and then click on privacy and then phone number and so this is the new default setting here who can see my number it's gonna be set to nobody now if someone has you added as a contact in their phone then your phone number is going to pop up in the Signal app and it's going to say that you know you're added as a signal contact on their side in the Signal app and you also have the option to remove someone being able to find you by your phone number and if you do this then you're definitely gonna want to make sure that you set a username so that people are able to find you so to do that click on your profile photo down here and usernames have to be at least three characters in length they can't start with a number and they also can't contain symbols other than an underscore and you're also required to have at least two digits at the end of your username here signal will automatically generate it for you but you can go ahead and modify this if you wanted to and just change it to whatever you want and you can also make it I think up to nine characters in length yeah up to nine characters in length for the digits and then of course your username also has to be unique so I'm gonna just go ahead and set mine to Bob 92 for right now I'll save it and then you can easily share your username with people this way by clicking this to generate a QR code so obviously this would work better if you're using the signal beta app on your phone you could just generate this QR code and then they can scan it with their phone and then it'll automatically add them as a contact you know or give them an option to contact you message you in the signal app right there or you could just copy this link right here and then you can message that to somebody you know hey message me on signal boom and then they'll be able to message you here as the username Bob 92 and then of course you can just change this username whenever you want to here you can change it to Alice we'll say and then yeah Alice 89 and then save that and then you'll see it changes our QR code and our link and if you know somebody's username you can also search for it here in the chats so let's do fine by username and let's type in the username for another signal account I'm using Alice 96 I think we have to put a period where it separates the yeah there we go and no groups in common so if you had groups in common then that would show up here and let's message them hello and then if we switch over to another Ubuntu desktop we see a message request from Bob and we can accept Bob here and then we'll also be able to see his profile picture and of course it comes back over here but we can't see this person's phone number anywhere on either screen so yeah that's signal usernames for you in the beta app and I would expect this to roll out to the stable version of the app sometime in the future so you'll be able to update one day and have this feature and I really like this I think that this is a great step in the direction of being able to completely decouple phone numbers from the signal app if you wanted to like to be able to sign up without having to give your real number to signal at all of course you could still get a burner Sam you could get a Google voice or some other virtual phone number then use that to register a signal account but I think having that option to not expose something as personal as a phone number to signal would be greatly appreciated in a private chat app and maybe leave the phone number registration or searching by phone numbers in there as an option as well so that people who want to use it as say a WhatsApp replacement maybe if you can convince you know like older folks in your family to use signal then they can start using it that way that way there's more people that are actually using signal in the first place but I really think not requiring a phone number is going to be an important thing for signal to add one day it's honestly one of the main selling points of session because that uses the same protocol as a signal and the only other big difference is that session is sending all of your traffic over low key net by default but let me know what you think about signals username update in the comments below like and share this video to hack the algorithm and check on my online store base dot when where you can automatically save 10% on all of your items at checkout when paying in Monero XMR have a great rest of your day