Developers have opened the messenger Signal, oriented towards providing protected communications through encryption to maintain the confidentiality of correspondence. They have implemented the possibility of hiding the phone number attached to the account and instead using a separate name-identifier. Optional settings that allow users to hide their phone number from others and prohibit the determination of the user by phone number when searching will appear in the next release of Signal 7.0, currently in the beta testing stage (Signal Beta).
In the upcoming version, users will be able to add contacts without a phone number by sending a QR code or a special link. Additionally, users will have the option to generate a unique name-identifier for their account, which can be used for searching and adding users to the address book without revealing their phone number (the name-identifier does not overlap with the name selected in chats).
While the name-identifier can be used for connecting to Signal, users are still required to register their account with a phone number. To safeguard against revealing the phone number behind the name-identifier on the Signal infrastructure, the identifier is stored in the form of a hash created using the algorithm ristretto 25519.