Everything they don't tell you about Signal: Beware of SMS management and how to completely delete your account

Signal has been growing over the weeks, all after WhatsApp is going to impose its privacy policy as of May 15. The application claims to be quite safe against its competition, which at the moment are the aforementioned WhatsApp and the already known Telegram.

The Signal application is committed to a fairly simple interface, once you install it and run it, it will show you the contacts that are present at that time. On some occasion you will have to access the list of telephone contacts if you want to start chatting with those people with the app installed.

Be careful with the phone number

Start signal shows your phone number, Anyone can appreciate yours and vice versa, it is one of the big drawbacks and this makes you lose big points. At the moment, if we talk about privacy, the number should "not be visible" to anyone, but it is something that must be solved soon.

E.g. Telegram is based on an alias, it will only ask you for the phone number at first To register, then you can hide it in several ways: For all contacts, only visible to your contacts or not visible to anyone, the latter is the right one if you want maximum security.

Beware of SMS!

Many users already have reported that they have inadvertently activated the option to send SMS via Signal, this option can be easily disabled in the application settings. If you do not have SMS contracted with your operator, you run the risk that they will charge you for each of them.

To deactivate it is quite easy, you only have to enter the three vertical points, Once inside, click on "SMS and MMS", now deactivate both options It shows you, in SMS application choose "Telephone" instead of Signal and you will have it assigned with the usual application.

Call quality

After trying with my partner Francisco Ruiz (@Pakomola) the voice call function I can say that it does not offer great quality, the service has to improve a lot compared to its more direct competition. At the moment there are many more cons than pros, including showing your phone number if we talk about security.

Another of the big drawbacks apart from the quality of the call It is the small number of users in my network of contacts, only two people had the application installed. It touches to remember that Signal is installed in about 50 million devices, while Telegram is present in 525 million terminals and WhatsApp reached 2.000 billion active users.

How to delete your Signal account

To delete the Signal account you will have to do it through its settingsIt is not enough to uninstall the application, since it will show that you are still present in it even if you do not have it installed. For this, the process is similar to what happens with WhatsApp of wanting to delete the information and messages.

To delete the Signal account you have to do the following:

• Access the three vertical points and then click on Settings
• Search for "Advanced" and click on the option
• Now click on «Delete account», enter your phone number, select your country and finally click on «Delete account» and when you skip the message, click on "Delete account"

With this process you will delete the Signal account, then remove the application by clicking on it on the desktop, hold down for a second and click on "Uninstall" to remove it completely. With these two steps you will eliminate any trace, since if you do not delete your account you would appear as a user of the application even without having it installed.