Jami identities and telephone numbers

1

Dear all,
one is in contact with other Jami users only after one has exchanged Jami identities, and not upon exchange of telephone numbers.
Is this due to how Jami works, and cannot be changed, or is it a choice of the developers?
I tried to convince a few friends to use Jami but most of them refused, I got the impression that getting one’s Jami contact upon exchange of telephone numbers would have helped there.

2

I never used a SIP Account …

However, if you make calls using Jami (user) Accounts I don’t know any possibility to use a phone number.
You just create a Jami user account (and the other person(s) you want to talk to) and that’s it. (Yes - you need to invite the other person before…)

It’s not like Signal or WhatsApp that use your phone number as unique identifier.

3

I understood half of what you said :slight_smile:
Said this, for the diffusion of other messaging systems the fact that as soon as you exchange telephone numbers you have also the contact I think has been decisive. Maybe it is worth considering an equivalent mechanism, or maybe it is not possible and one needs to keep Jami as it is.

4

Personally, I wouldn’t want Jami to depend on phone numbers.

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5

I do not know anything about the technical side to know whether what I say is sensible or not, but it must not depend on phone numbers, it can just use them if they are available.

6

Agree entirely. Part of Jami’s attraction, in fact.

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7

It seems to me that perhaps jami is not the best option for you. The ability alone of looking at your phone numbers (contact’s and own) is a sign of danger. Jami is not meant to be a cell phone app. It can be used in a computer too. And there is no special place in a computer OS to store contacts. There are human beings that refuse to pay for the privilege to be tracked by (for example) Frudeau, or Brandon. Plus, I am happy that the person who was half understood by you understands better than you what danger to freedom means.

8

@pireddag If you want to use a (phone) app that CAN link your phone number to your username / ID you should try Threema (Link: https://threema.ch/en) or Teleguard (Link:https://teleguard.com/en ).

9

Thanks for the tips on Threema and Teleguard. But these are applications that depend on servers. Till now, I have been convinced that an application that does not depend on servers is better, as one does not have to trust the people who run the servers. By the way the multiplication of applications is not necessarily good for free software.

I am thinking about all of the answers on the thread. If I have any other comments I will post them. Taking the juice from the answers, I understood the following: it is not possible to connect a Jami identity to a phone number in a way that won’t be publicly or semi-publicly known. And probably that does not depend on technical implementations, but depends only on the fact that as soon as you give your phone number to anyone, they will have your Jami identity as well, and so will be able to link them together.

Which is a pity in a way, because it means automatically dividing the number of potential users by 100 at least.

P.S.
I don’t claim to understand what “danger to freedom” means but I do not think that any message in this thread can be used to infer something about the ability to understand it :wink: