The private messenger that never asks for your phone number

You probably send dozens of messages a day without thinking about who, besides the person you are texting, gets to know about it. It is a fair thing not to think about — until you do. And the surprising part is that the riskiest piece is usually not what you wrote. It is everything around it.

This post is about what “private messaging” actually means for an ordinary person, and about one app that takes the idea further than most — partly because the team behind it has just had to fight to keep it alive.

“Encrypted” is only half the story

Plenty of apps now encrypt your messages end-to-end, which means the contents can only be read by you and the person you are talking to — not even the company running the app can see them. That is genuinely good, and it is why a service like Signal is a real step up from plain SMS or email.

But the content of a message is only one layer. The other is metadata: who you talked to, when, how often, from where. That pattern can be every bit as revealing as the words — and most apps still need one thing that ties all of it straight back to the real you: your phone number. Hand over a phone number and the convenient, encrypted app also knows exactly who you are, and so does anyone who can later get at that link.

The app that asks for nothing

Session is built around removing that link. To sign up you do not give a phone number, an email, or a name — you get a random account ID and a recovery phrase, and that is it. Messages are end-to-end encrypted like the better apps, but Session also routes them through a network of servers so that not even the path your message takes reveals your location. It is open source, run by a Swiss non-profit (the Session Technology Foundation), and it currently has around 1.7 million people using it every month.

None of this means Signal or others are bad — Signal is excellent, and for many people it is the right choice; it simply still wants a phone number. The point is not which app wins. It is that some private option belongs in your pocket, and Session is a strong one precisely because it asks for nothing to identify you.

(5bats uses Session as its own contact channel, for exactly these reasons.)

Why these tools need you

Here is the part most people never see. Privacy tools like this are not big companies selling your attention — they are usually small non-profits living on donations, and that makes them fragile in a way the ad-funded apps are not.

Session is a live example. Earlier this year it ran low enough on funding that shutdown was genuinely on the table. The community responded, the shutdown was cancelled, and the project has now secured a path forward into 2027 — though on a smaller team than before. It survived because people who valued it chipped in.

That is the quiet lesson worth taking away: the tools that protect you only keep existing if the people who rely on them help carry them. If a service like Session is useful to you, a donation — even a small one — is what keeps it alive and growing, rather than scrambling the next time funding gets tight. The same goes for the other privacy and open-source tools you depend on.

The takeaway

Private messaging is not about having something to hide. It is about not handing your identity and your patterns to everyone in the chain by default — and about keeping the tools that make that possible around for the long run. Pick a messenger that respects you, and when one earns its place in your life, consider helping it stay.