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 for more if not all of our correspondence, raising the baseline of security and privacy 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 and contact link
- Enable the Registration Lock for your Signal account
- Setting additional Signal privacy protections
- Publicizing your Signal profile to clients
- Verifying your Signal Safety Number with clients you meet
- Using Signal to share photos and media
- Using built-in Signal organization and productivity features
- Feedback welcomed!
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. You can then run through its straightforward phone number registration process or, if you don’t have or don’t want to register a phone number, you can register a Signal account without a phone number.
Getting multiple Signal profiles
When using Signal, each distinct installation of the app gets 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.
Each Signal account can also optionally be associated with a single phone number. That means you’ll need multiple SMS-capable phone numbers if you want multiple accounts associated with 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 only have an iPhone and you need a second Signal profile, get a new phone and make it an Android phone!
- If you have an Android phone, you have two options:
- get Molly.im, a security-hardened fork of Signal for Android that can be run side-by-side with the official Signal app on your Android device. Use Molly for one of your Signal profiles, and the official Signal app for the other.
- create a new Android operating system user account for each of your work personas and install Signal independently for each user on your 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 account’s Signal phone number secret, as I do with my personal Signal accounts, then you should ensure your phone number is never shared with your Signal contacts.
When you do this, you should also create a Signal username (described next) so that other Signal users can start a conversation with you. (Otherwise, only you can start new conversations, as no one else can reach out to you without you reaching out to them, first.) 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 and contact link
You will almost certainly want a Signal username and a Signal contact link.
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 at least 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. If you have a website or booking form, a contact link will make it possible to contact you in one click, which is how mine works.
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.
Enable the Registration Lock for your Signal account
Registering a new Signal account simply requires an SMS verification code, which is not as secure as Signal messages themselves. This means someone who hijacks your phone number (known as a SIM swap attack) can re-register your Signal account to their phone, resulting in an account takeover, or ATO.
If someone does this to you, they will still not see any messages that were previously sent to you, but it does mean that new messages sent to your account will be routed to their phone instead of yours. If your contacts are not careful about verifying Signal Safety Numbers with you, they may not notice the hijacking. To prevent this, I strongly recommend you enable Signal’s Registration Lock feature.
The Registration Lock feature disallows Signal account transfers without entering a second, extra passcode called a Signal PIN. Treat this Signal PIN like a second password, and store it the same way you save any other password, such as in your password manager. (I like Bitwarden.)
My recommendations:
- Set another, second Signal PIN.
- Once your Signal PIN is set, enable Signal’s Registration Lock.
- Find this feature in Signal Settings → Account → Registration Lock.
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 from scams 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.
Set a default disappearing message timer
Every message you send on the Internet, whether email, text message, or Signal message, is delivered as a copy of your original message. This is markedly different from the physical world, where writing a letter and mailing an envelope means you no longer have the original copy yourself. This means when you send a Signal message to a client or customer, there are really at least two (unencrypted) copies of that message in the world: one on your phone, and one on their phone.
Once you’ve sent a message and a copy has been delivered to your recipient, you can no longer control what they do with it. However, using Signal’s disappearing message timer feature, you can politely request that they not keep these copies forever. The fewer copies of your correspondence that exist in the world, and the less time they exist for, the less likely one of those copies will end up being seen by people you don’t want seeing them.
This is why the first thing I do whenever I start a conversation with someone is set the disappearing message timer to a timeframe that makes me feel comfortable speaking more freely with them.
My recommendations:
- Set Signal to automatically start new conversations with a disappearing message timer.
- Find this option in Signal Settings → Privacy → Default timer for new chats.
- You can always adjust or remove this timer for future messages or other conversations.
- Remember that this is a request and your recipient may still keep their own chat backups.
- If you want to further request that your recipient does not retain copies of your disappearing messages, your disappearing message timer must be set to a duration shorter than 24 hours.
Omit message content from notifications
Messaging applications like Signal include features that let you see a bit of information about the messages you’re getting even if the app itself isn’t open. This can be convenient because it may mean you don’t have to unlock your phone to read the start of a long thread, but it also means a part of the message is no longer protected by the Signal app itself, since it’s now on the lock screen.
This feature works thanks to a service built into modern computer and phone operating systems generically called a notification handler. Apps can register with the notification handler provided by Apple or Google to receive information about activity that happens in the app even when the app itself is not currently running.
Unfortunately, using this feature makes your messages less private because it requires sharing the previewed part of your formerly private message content with the notification service. Thankfully, the makers of Signal know this, so they have a setting to disable message content from being shared through notifications.
My recommendations:
- Set Signal to omit at least the content of messages from notifications by setting the notification content option to
Name only.- Find this option in Signal Settings → Notifications → Show → Name only.
- You can further protect your privacy in the case of a device compromise by setting this option to
No name or message, but at the cost of reading who it was that sent you a message until after you open the Signal app.
Disable link previews
When sharing links to Web sites, Signal can generate a preview of the destination as part of the message you send. This is called a link preview and you might be familiar with it from sites like Bluesky or other social media that pull a featured photo and a short description from the page you’re linking to. Some people enjoy this feature because it can help recipients decide whether they’d like to click through to the link you’re sending them.
While link previews in Signal are implemented carefully, the more you ask your apps to do, the more possibility there is that something, at some point, goes wrong. Security professionals call this concept an attack surface, and the smaller you make this surface, the safer you are, because the less liklihood there is of something going wrong hurting you.
Learn more about Signal’s link preview feature.
My recommendations:
- Unless you know that you need link previews, and I’d argue no one really needs them, turn this feature off.
- Find this option in Signal Settings → Chats → Generate link previews, and disable them.
- If you really like link previews, you can leave them enabled. If you’re worried about link security, though, just turn them off.
Enable the Screen Lock
Enabling the Screen Lock feature in Signal helps ensure only you can interact with your messages. When enabled, Signal’s Screen Lock locks the screen of your phone when you open the app, revealing the app screens themselves only after you re-enter your phone’s passcode, passphrase, or other unlocking method.
My recommendations:
- Always enable Screen Lock. There is no reason Signal should be available to anyone who picks up your phone if they are not you.
- Set a reasonable Screen Lock Timeout. The shorter the timeout, the more often you will need to enter your passphrase.
- You can safely set a longer Screen Lock Timeout if you enable your phone’s immediate Lock feature; iPhones and Android phones can lock their screens when you press the power or another button once. Lock the phone, and you also lock access to all the apps on it, including Signal.
Change the Signal app’s home screen icon
There is nothing illegal or inherently suspicious about having Signal installed on your phone in most places around the world. However, if this is not true where you live or work, or if you’d just like Signal to remain a little more discreet on your home screen, you can change the appearance of its app icon.
Bear in mind that changing the appearance of Signal’s app icon doesn’t change anything about the way the app works. It is a form of visual camouflage to hide from a human using their eyes, not a way to hide the installation from an electronic surveillance or forensics tool. When used as a safety measure, this feature is arguably most important for people experiencing intimate partner violence, whose abusive spouse, relative, or boss may periodically visually inspect their phone.
My recommendations:
- Don’t stress. You have a right to use Signal, and the more you use it for mundane, everyday communications, the more normal having Signal is.
- Feel free to change the app icon if you want to, for safety or even for fun decorative reasons.
- If you are experiencing close physical surveillance from an abusive partner and you have an Android phone, consider installing Signal into your phone’s Private Space instead. Using the Android Private Space is a far more secure way to protect sensitive data and apps than using a camouflaged app icon.
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. As of this writing, only 22 Burlington and TS4Rent offer this contact option, but both are subpar implementations (they should be letting us paste our Signal contact links along with our usernames, not just phone numbers), and sadly few providers on these platforms even publish their Signal contact info there, despite having Signal profiles. In lieu of that, my Tryst contact details section looked like so for quite some time:
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 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.
Third-party Signal Safety Number verification
There are a number of situations where you want to ensure that you’re talking to the same Signal account someone else is before you actually meet them yourself.
For example, you and a client are setting up a duo or double date with another provider who also uses Signal, but only your client has actually met the other provider. Signal Safety Numbers make it possible for you to positively identify the other provider when they message you, and with as much trust as you have for your mutual client.
This is a very slick thing you can do with Signal Safety Numbers and it’s called a third-party verification.
While Signal Safety Numbers are unique for every one-to-one conversation, they are not conventional fingerprinting codes (called “hashes,” in cryptography parlance). Instead, they are simply concatenations of your Signal account ID and the other party’s Signal account ID. This means exactly one-half of every Signal Safety Number you see will be the same as every other. That half is actually your Signal account’s fingerprint! The other half of each of those Safety Numbers is the other party’s Signal account’s fingerprint.
For example, when you send me a Signal message to my (general purpose) Signal account, exactly half of the Signal Safety Number of our conversation will be:
41717 82698 64355 69846 75778 93192
Meanwhile, if you do the same to my dedicated booking inquiry/client intake Signal account, exactly half of the Signal Safety Number of our conversation will be:
91716 29464 14327 54916 92779 94045
This means the Signal Safety Number that I see when I send messages from one of my Signal accounts to the other is:
41717 82698 64355 69846 75778 93192 91716 29464 14327 54916 92779 94045
It doesn’t matter which account’s fingerprint is positioned in the first half or second half of the conversation’s Safety Number. The point is simply that it’s there, and matches with exactly one half.
Try this yourself by sending me a message or submitting my booking form. (I really won’t mind. Just make sure you clearly identify your purpose as a Safety Number test and not a real inquiry when sending your message, please!) As long as exactly half of the conversation’s Safety Number matches, you know you’ve reached my Signal account.
Now that you know this, you can compare the Safety Number of anyone’s conversation with anyone else to see whether or not you are also talking to one of those same accounts.
For example, say your client is setting up a duo with you and another provider who uses Signal. Ask your client to share with you the Safety Number of their conversation with the other provider, and your Signal contact info with the other provider. Eventually, you’ll receive a message claiming to be from the other provider. Since you have previously noted the Safety Number of the other provider’s conversation with your client, you simply need to confirm that exactly half of the Safety Number of your conversation with the person who messaged you matches exactly half of the Safety Number your client sent you.
If they match, even if the match is not in the same position (first half or second half), then you know you and your client are speaking with the same second provider.
My recommendations:
- If it’s socially appropriate, an easier way to do this is to just make a Signal group chat and invite all the relevant parties to the group.
- Otherwise, always ask for the Signal Safety Number of the other person’s conversation with the new person and use that to verify incoming messages you receive claiming to be that person match the account the messages should be coming from.
- Never blindly trust that an incoming message is from the person they claim to be; verify your communication through your mutual contact, first.
- Once you are in person, verify your Safety Number with the new-to-you person as described above because physical proximity is always more trustworthy than third-party verification.
Using Signal to share photos and media
Beyond being a highly secure messenger and video calling application, Signal is also a fantastic way to share photos and some other media with clients. You can use Signal to send individual or bundled photosets, audio files, and even short videos to customers in a way that is safer than uploading your media to Dropbox or Google Drive and then sending a link to your customer.
Signal is a much safer media delivery option because media files can all contain embedded, often invisible information about you or the method you used to create it. For example, pictures you take using your phone camera may write the GPS coordinates of your location where you took the photo into the image file itself. (A digital sleuth can find this information if they know where to look.) If you took the image at home, you probably want to remove that extra information before you send that image to a customer.
Using Signal, every media file you send will automatically have common metadata such as location data scrubbed out of it. However, to save bandwidth, Signal will also compress media you send to a lower quality unless you ask it not to. If you’re using Signal to send digital purchases to customers, you want to enable support for sending high-definition media.
My recommendations:
- Enable Signal’s high-definition media sharing option:
- Find this option in Signal Settings → Data and storage management → Media quality → Sent media quality → High.
- Always scrub metadata out of any media you intend to share outside of Signal by first sending it to yourself via Signal’s Note To Self feature.
- Signal limits media attachments to 100 megabytes per message.
- If you need to send a bundle that’s larger than this for free, try Wormhole.app after scrubbing the individual media’s metadata as described above.
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!
