I can’t help but think of Gulag Archipelago when Stalin had all the engineers arrested for “wrecking” because they could not make nonsensical orders lead to the desired output. In any industry.

This is really interesting. It brings two questions to mind.

1. Don’t all messaging apps use phone number as a primary metadata value?

2. Are you suggesting that Signal could either not use this metadata or not collect it and yet they choose to collect it and can therefore lose it to exfiltration or warrant?