Violet Rollergirl’s Guide to Using Signal Private Messenger in Sex Work
ⓘ This page is for providers. If you are a client or customer you should instead read Violet Rollergirl’s Guide to Messaging (Your Sex Worker) Discreetly.
My favorite messaging platform as an independent escort is Signal Private Messenger. It is quite simply the messenger with the best balance of being widely adopted, easy to use, and actually secure. It’s also free of charge, solidly reliable, wildly performant, and globally available.
I use Signal for far more than just my business needs, but its featureset is so uniquely useful for my career as a sex worker that I often find myself lamenting that it isn’t already a standard part of every provider and client’s toolbox.
This article is my attempt to convey why Signal Private Messenger is so useful and simultaneously show you how to use it in your business. My hope is that by documenting how I use it, more of the industry will shift to communicating this way by default, raising the baseline of security and privacy in our industry that will keep us all safer.
In this article
- The problem with texting apps
- Getting Signal
- Filling out your Signal profile
- Keeping your Signal phone number private
- Setting your Signal username
- Setting additional Signal privacy protections
- Publicizing your Signal profile to clients
- Verifying your Signal Safety Number with clients you meet
- Using built-in Signal organization and productivity features
The problem with texting apps
Put simply, they suck. (I might actually write more here at some point but for now, that really suffices.)
The biggest issue with them is simply that messages often get dropped, or simply don’t get delivered. Many sex workers have lost clients due to flaky text app ridiculousness. We hate texting apps with the passion of a thousand suns.
Getting Signal
Signal Private Messenger is free and available for iOS via the App Store and Android via the Google Play Store. There is also a Desktop version of the app available for macOS, Windows, and most major GNU/Linux distributions, but it acts as an add-on to the app on your phone, so install the mobile app version first.
Once you have Signal installed, open the app on your phone and run through its straightforward registration process.
Getting multiple Signal profiles
When using Signal, each distinct installation of the app gets associated with a single registered number and its own Signal profile. This means your Signal account must refer to a single work persona.
If you only have one work persona and only use Signal for work, this isn’t a problem. But if you have, say, a GFE persona and a pro-domme or massage persona, or you want to maintain separate personal and work Signal profiles, you may need multiple Signal installations. You’ll also need multiple SMS-capable phone numbers.
You can use any number for Signal, including numbers obtained via burner, VoIP, or free texting apps, so long as the number you’re using isn’t already associated with a Signal account. You can also choose to keep this number hidden from other Signal users so that no one contacting you via Signal knows your number. That said, allowing clients to find your Signal account via your work phone number may actually be useful for you as a provider.
It doesn’t particularly matter how you acquire a second SMS/texting number, as long as you can retain access to it for the lifetime of your second Signal account. I like JMP.chat and Phreeli.com because both of these options allow me to pay for another phone line in cryptocurrency.
Crypto is not required, though, as any such service, whether VoIP app or baseband eSIM, will work. Another user friendly option I like is MySudo.
My recommendations:
- If you have a dedicated phone for your work persona, install Signal there and use your work phone’s number as your work Signal number. Easy.
- If you have an Android phone, create a new Android operating system user account for each of your work personas and install Signal independently for each user on your phone.
- If you only have an iPhone and you need a second Signal profile, get a new phone and make it an Android phone!
Filling out your Signal profile
Your Signal profile is visible only to people with whom you exchange messages. It’s not published in a directory. It also remains hidden from anyone who messages you, until you accept their message request. Crucially, it is also not visible to the Signal servers themselves.
This is a key distinction between Signal and other services, notably WhatsApp Business: in Signal, it is safe to put spicy links and other references to your work in Signal profiles you use for work. Doing this will get you banned off WhatsApp, and I speak from experience (twice) when I say this.
Here’s what my Signal profile looks like at the time of this writing:
My recommendations:
- Use a photo from your website or ad listings for brand recognition.
- Fill out your profile and ensure you include a link back to your website or primary ad.
Keeping your Signal phone number private
If you are using a dedicated phone for work and you want clients to be able to find your Signal profile from your publicly listed work phone number, you can ignore this section. However, if you have a personal Signal profile or you simply desire to keep your Signal phone number secret, as I do, then you should ensure your phone number is never shared with your Signal contacts.
When you do this, you also must create a Signal username (described next) so that other Signal users can start a conversation with you. This is how I’ve set up my work Signal profile, so that clients who read my Contact page have a Signal link they can click to connect with me, via my Signal username.
My recommendations:
- If your Signal phone number is a number associated with your legal identity, hide it from your Signal profile.
- If your Signal phone number is a public work number you are comfortable sharing with clients, make it discoverable to ease a client’s first contact.
Setting your Signal username
You will almost certainly want a Signal username. If you chose to keep your Signal phone number private, there will be no way for clients to contact you if you don’t also choose a username. Even if you allow other users to find your Signal profile by your phone number, it’s still a good idea for those of us using Signal to intake inquiries to set a Signal username.
To create or change your Signal username, open Signal → tap your profile icon → Settings (iOS) → tap on your profile → tap by the @ symbol:
In Signal, usernames act very much like a phone number in that they are merely an address that someone can use to initiate contact with you. They are not the same as your profile name, which is the name you wrote for yourself when registering in your Signal profile, nor are they your Safety Number, which is a unique code that others can use to check if they are really communicating with who they think they are.
Your Signal username can also be encoded as a QR code or a clickable link. Both of these will become unusable if you later change your username, even if you keep your Signal profile name the same.
My recommendations:
- Choose a Signal username that matches your brand. Signal usernames have certain length and formatting requirements that you must meet.
- Create a Signal contact link, while you’re at it.
Setting additional Signal privacy protections
Once you have created your Signal profile and determined your comfort with your phone number’s discoverability, you should consider switching on these additional privacy protections offered by the Signal app. You can also learn more about how to protect yourself on Signal from their documentation itself.
Always relay calls
Signal’s end-to-end encryption extends beyond just text message or media sharing; when you connect an audio or video call on Signal, the audio and video data in the call is encrypted, too. However, for performance reasons, Signal’s servers offload the bulk of the connection to the individual phones engaged in the call, meaning that the person you are calling or video chatting with can learn your Internet Protocol (IP) address while the call is connected.
This direct endpoint-to-endpoint connection makes high quality Signal calls so performant, but it might also be a privacy risk, so Signal also allows you to force all audio and video calls to be relayed through the Signal servers. This does not mean Signal can listen in on your calls, but rather that the person you are calling cannot learn your IP address when you pick up the call. It might mean that the call quality is slightly less good, but in practice I have never found it to be a concern and I have enjoyed many spicy video dates with suitors over Signal.
My recommendations:
- Always enable Signal’s Always relay calls feature. Find it in the Privacy → Advanced → Always relay calls setting in your Signal app.
- If you use Signal Desktop, make sure you enable this feature there, too.
Allow sealed sender from anyone
Signal makes it possible for you as a user to restrict who can contact you, such as limiting incoming messages to only pre-approved contacts. This is a great feature to enable for a personal Signal profile, but it doesn’t make much sense from the perspective of a service provider who wants to be found by new clients.
Put another way, as a provider, I want it to be possible for anyone to contact me, but I don’t want anyone except me to know who is contacting me. That’s exactly what the sealed sender feature in Signal makes possible. While the Signal service always needs to know where a message should be delivered, ideally it shouldn’t need to know who the sender is.
When you enable “sealed sender allow from anyone” for your Signal account, it becomes possible for clients who find your Signal contact information to send you messages that no one, not even Signal, knows is specifically from them and destined to you, even if they’ve never contacted you before.
Learn more about Signal’s sealed sender metadata protection on their blog.
My recommendations:
- If you are open to receiving new clients or customers, ensure sealed sender’s allow from anyone is enabled for your Signal account.
- Find this setting in Privacy → Advanced → Sealed sender → Allow from anyone
- Disable this option for your personal Signal profiles, or if you experience large amounts of harassing messages from unknown senders.
Publicizing your Signal profile to clients
Once you have Signal set up for work, it’s time to gently lean on your clients to stop texting you and start messaging you on Signal.
I would personally love to see Tryst and other escort mall ad sites provide a Signal contact field for us to fill in, but in lieu of that, I’ve written my Tryst contact details section like so:
My recommendations:
- Display your Signal username anywhere that makes sense to encourage more clients to reach out via Signal.
- Publish your Signal contact link on your website’s contact page. See how I’ve done mine.
- This is also how my booking form integrates with Signal directly!
Verifying your Signal Safety Number with clients you meet
Integrity verification is an often overlooked part of the security of a communications platform, but Signal made this process easy.
One good habit to get into is to verify the Signal Safety Number of your conversation with your client at some point during your first meeting. A Signal Safety Number is a numeric code that uniquely identifies each one-to-one chat with a Signal contact. If the Safety Number you see for your conversation with a client is the same as what they see, you can be more confident in the security of your messages with one another.
Information security professionals often refer to a concept called the CIA triad. This has nothing to do with the Central Intelligence Agency. Instead, it’s a simple framework for evaluating the security of any information system. It stands for confidentiality, integrity, and availability. I prefer to refer to it as the “infosec triforce” because I’m a nerd for triangles, and Zelda.
One easy way to think about the difference between confidentiality and integrity:
- Confidentiality ensures the privacy of a given message between any two parties.
- Integrity ensures the two parties in a given conversation are in fact the two parties you expect to be in that specific conversation.
- (Availability simply means that the system can be used when it is needed.)
If a system is confidential but not integrious, it isn’t really “secure.” I verify Signal Safety Numbers even though it takes a small additional step, because it’s different from the automatic and default end-to-end encryption Signal offers by default.
Just to hammer this point home, consider that it’s certainly possible for me to be having a conversation over the Internet with someone who turns out to be someone else. As a sex worker, I’m sure you’ve no doubt been targeted by phishing scams claiming that your Tryst account is under review and you must act now to restore your profile. Well, clients fear a similar thing.
Such impersonation is exactly what Safety Number verification protects both me and my clients from falling victim to after we’ve confirmed the integrity of our Signal conversation.
Verifying Signal Safety Numbers is best to do in person simply because the expense of impersonating someone in the physical world makes it extremely unlikely for anyone to be able to pull it off successfully. In other words, the expense of reproducing all the analog signals it would take to impersonate me in person—the feel of my hair, the color of my eyes, the way I move, the inflection in my voice when I speak, hell, even the heady scent of sex—is itself what assures my client of the realness and security of our Signal conversation.
So, usually near the end of our first encounter, or sometimes shortly after we first meet if I remember and if I think it wouldn’t be too much of an exercise in digital paranoia for my client to accomodate, I like to ask that we verify Signal Safety Numbers.
My recommendations:
- Always verify the Signal Safety Number of a conversation with contacts when you meet them in person.
- Do not use Signal Safety Numbers in lieu of screening or other safety protocols. Safety Numbers are solely for ensuring your Signal messages have originated from the expected Signal account, nothing more.
- Avoid uninstalling Signal or unregistering your Signal account, as this will reset your Signal account identity, and consequently invalidate prior Signal Safety Numbers you’ve verified.
- Instead, if you might find yourself getting digitally strip searched, use Signal’s built-in Storage Management features to delete conversations and message history to minimize the data retained on your device.
Using built-in Signal organization and productivity features
In addition to some of its state of the art privacy and security guarantees, Signal also provides a number of built-in organization and productivity tools that I swear by every day. Here are my favorites.
- Notification profiles let you decide how, when, and from whom you receive notifications. For example, you can create different settings for situations such as work, sleep, or specific times of the day.
- Chat Folders make it possible to separate chat threads into folders that can be switched via tabs in the chat list. This can be useful for grouping chats together into a work folder, friend folder, or unread folder for example.
- Scheduled messages mean you can compose a message in advance and choose when it will be sent.
Feedback welcomed!
Found a typo? Have a better way to do something? I’ve done my best to thoroughly research and test everything in these articles. But this space moves quickly, and there’s a lot to know.
If you’re a fellow provider and need help, have suggestions to improve this guide, or just want to talk cool privacy tech, please feel free to contact me or to find me on any of my socials!
