in 2018, Facebook told Vox that it doesn’t use private messages for ad targeting. But a few months later, The New York Times, citing “hundreds of pages of Facebook documents,” reported that Facebook “gave Netflix and Spotify the ability to read Facebook users’ private messages.”
Surprising? No. Appalling? Yes.
It was fixed a month ago https://signal.org/blog/phone-number-privacy-usernames/
No. That doesn’t eliminate the need to use a phone number! It’s just ‘hidden’.
That’s not the point. It was statet that each message is associated with the number. But it isn’t. The only way to achieve this in Signal is getting into your phone.