Anonymous conversations - proposal: hidden phone number agreement procedure

[2072]

• I have searched open and closed issues for duplicates

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Feature request

It's currently not possible to hide our phone number when making a Signal call but in some cases this can be useful as long as the person receiving the call agrees to receive this specific call in the first place.

This is particularly useful in the following situation:

• The emitting party is a psychologist or a physician who needs to practice remotely, and thus will discuss intimate and private matters with their patient, while still needing to prevent their phone number from being abused by the same patient (future unsolicited calls and messages...).
• Any situation like the above where involved parties need to preserve their identities or their futur privacy (in most countries, cellular phone numbers are tied to the individuals' identity. ie: you can't get a phone number without giving your official identity to the network provider)
• Completely anonymised groups (if one of the group's participant is compromised, no data in the phone would reveal the other members identity)
• There are probably more unforeseen applications, but I find this feature is really missing in the current circumstances, where most people are resorting to standard post-card-phone calls with their physicist...

To make this possible one of the parties would initiate the procedure by generating a random string of characters (easy to type or prononce, maybe a list of words?) and the other parties, knowing this string would join (this procedure prevents invite spam).

The initiating party would be able to define the following:

• They would be able to define the maximum number of participants
• The duration of the agreement
• The direction of the agreement ie: send and receive - send only - receive only, etc...
• The type of the agreement (chat only, voice, videos, file attachements, etc...)
• Group type (static - where group members can't change, dynamic, etc...)
• Temporary revocability ('disable' the agreement once the counselling session is over for example...)
• etc...

All of these parameters would be made part of the random string, which would be communicated to the other parties using another mean of communication. The fact of the parameters being part of the string would ensure their immutability and allow the involved parties to review the terms of the agreements without the need to communicate further.

The emitter will trigger the acceptance of new participants voluntarily (a bit like bluetooth pairing works) preventing unexpected guests from joining in the future.
The fact that the number of participants is encoded in the "agreement string" also guaranties the stability of the group to all parties....

Well, many other (great) features and application could come from this but for now my main concern is for private one to one conversation (physician to patient)

I'm not sure if this is at all possible given Signal's protocol but this would really be useful in many ways we can't even imagine right now...

[ybabel]

I strongly agree and think that full anonymity is required for widespread adoption of signal.
I my case I immediately stopped using Signal when I saw my phone number displayed on top of a group chat. And many people told me the same.

[stale]

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