Nice, wholesale illegal wire tapping. It's OK, it's legal because it's AI and Google is totally not storing any recordings. They say this is all on-device, but that's an "oops" or equivalent from them hoovering up recordings of every phone call you use one of their surveillance endpoints phones on.
There are open source alternatives? Do they handle Plex/Infuse integration? Trakt's obsessive march toward enshitification has been pretty predictable, but maybe this price hike will be the last straw.
Signal doesn't use SMS at all, once you have enrolled. The phone number is used to validate people and exclude bots, during registration. As others have noted, you can hide your number from other users, as well.
They can "request" it all day long. Signal doesn't store them beyond the time needed to deliver to the end user device, and while (temporarily) stored, it's encrypted in a way Signal's service cannot read.
This process sucks so much. It takes too long to churn through the courts, which disenfranchises people for possibly multiple elections. If the map designers faced criminal charges, this type of bad faith map drawing would be far less prevalent than it is, across the country.
I read that it's "opt out" not "opt in".