- Signal, the encrypted messaging app, spurred an increase in new users through an increasing appetite for online privacy, with endorsements from Elon Musk, Jack Dorsey and Edward Snowden.
- Signal is an unusual technological success story: it is a non-profit organization without planning to raise venture capital or to raise money on its success. The encryption protocol is open source and free to use.
- Signal CEO Moxie Marlinspike told Insider about the company’s plans going forward, including potential new product offerings, in an extensive interview for Insider’s 2020 Transformers series in August, detailing the full conversation so far. has not been published.
- “I actually think that what we do is extremely normal, and that it’s everything else that’s insane,” Marlinspike said of Signal’s commitment to privacy.
- Visit Insider’s homepage for more stories.
Signal undoubtedly has a moment.
The encrypted messaging app has risen to the top of the charts for free downloading of apps in the Google and Apple app stores, where it has been floating for more than a week. More than 7.5 million people installed Signal between January 6 and 10 – an increase of 4,200% from the previous week, according to Sensor Tower – spurred by changes in data policies at competing WhatsApp and endorsements by the likes of Elon Musk, Jack Dorsey and Edward Snowden.
But Signal is an unusual technological success story. The app maker is owned by a non-profit organization and is funded by grants from WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton and the Knight Foundation, and has no plans to raise venture capital or raise money for its popularity. All the code it writes, including the core encryption protocols, is open source and free for all to use.
According to co-founder and CEO Moxie Marlinspike, Signal’s strength is simplicity. With Signal’s open source encryption, people can send messages to individuals or groups that no one else – including Signal himself – can read, and the company does not share any data about its users with third parties or sell ads. The commitment to privacy is increasingly rare for messages.
“I actually think that what we do is extremely normal, and that it’s all different that is insane,” Marlinspike said.
In an extensive interview held in August, Marlinspike told Insider about Signal’s origins and its meteoric rise over the past year, as well as his plans for the future. Excerpts from the interview were included in Insider’s 2020 Transformers series, but Marlinspike’s full comments have not been published so far.
Marlinspike wants Signal to be a standard bearer for privacy, as other programs increasingly rely on the merits of people’s personal data. He sees public opinion shifting towards technological ventures, with the optimism of the early 2010s attributed to growing mistrust in the consumer and a desire for privacy.
“When someone sends a message to their friend, it is not the intention to send the message to a conglomerate of advertisers, to hackers, to large technology companies. And people are always upset when they discover that it is not. the reality is not, “Marlinspike said. .
As Signal’s popularity increased, Marlinspike indicated that the company could eventually move to other products as a messaging program.
Asked if Signal is investigating privacy-focused products for features such as web browsing, Marlinspike said Signal’s ‘ultimate goal’ is to ‘expand to address other aspects of technology’, but declined to elaborate.
For now, he said, Signal is focusing on meeting the moment as hordes of new users flock to the app. The first remote business employed 36 people from October, and the job page offers five new development roles.
—Moxie Marlinspike (@moxie) 14 January 2021
‘The era of utopian thinking around technology is over’
The most recent increase in Signal’s popularity is due to WhatsApp’s competitor being able to share users’ personal data with Facebook, its parent company. Telegram, another app that promises end-to-end coding, has seen a similar increase in users in the wake of the WhatsApp announcement.
For that matter, Signal’s downloads rose during the summer, as the app was an asset to organizers and protesters who participated in the Black Lives Matter protests, one of the largest protest movements in U.S. history. Marlinspike also believes that the shift to online activity amid COVID-19 exclusions has accelerated people’s interest in online privacy.
“It’s important to realize that real change is happening privately,” he said. “If you do not really have private spaces left, I think you will give up a lot.”
Signal’s origins date back to 2013, when Marlinspike stopped working on Twitter to set up Open Whisper Systems. The nonprofit has focused on developing an encryption protocol that uses private keys to ensure that instant messages can only be obtained at the endpoints – which are not intercepted by the owners or third parties of an app – without to compromise the user convenience. The Signal app was first launched in 2014.
One of the earliest companies to express interest in Marlinspike’s project was, ironically, WhatsApp. In 2013, WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton recruited Marlinspike to incorporate the Signal protocol into his app. Then, in 2014, Facebook bought WhatsApp and Acton finally left the company in 2017 “due to differences around the use of customer data and targeted ads.” While WhatsApp messages themselves remain encrypted, the app keeps track of how often users log in and the phone numbers they use, among other things.
In 2018, Acton again partnered with Marlinspike to form The Signal Foundation, a non-profit organization that owns and manages the Signal app. Acton personally injected $ 50 million into the foundation, and he also received grants from The Shuttleworth Foundation, The Knight Foundation and the US Government-backed Open Technology Fund. Individual users can also donate to the non-profit organization through their website.
Signal does not intend to make money through its app, and Marlinspike considers the status to be lucrative as crucial to ensuring that it is ‘none other than the interests of the Signal community’. “He told Insider he was upset by the profit models of other popular programs, which register users’ data to pull more money from third-party advertisers and data brokers.
“There’s this madness about how everything works now,” he said. “Only a handful of companies have a lot of information about everyone – that’s a dangerous comparison.”
Consumers are getting smarter about protecting their own privacy online, Marlinspike said. This is reflected in the increasing popularity of Signal.
“The era of utopian thinking around technology is over – people no longer think of technology as something that will make it better and clearer tomorrow,” he said. “Instead, people are thinking more about the ways in which technologies can not actually serve it well.”
Resisting new threats to privacy
While Marlinspike is wary of how corporate incentives can drive technology businesses to take advantage of people’s privacy, it’s equally wary of public sector coding threats.
For most of the past decade, federal law enforcement officials from both the Obama and Trump administrations have put pressure on technology companies to abandon end-to-end coding.
At the urging of former Attorney General William Barr, Senate Republicans have introduced a bill requiring tech companies to break coding in response to law enforcement summonses, in a move that would warn civil liberties groups to be disastrous for online privacy.
Signal itself has become a target of frustration for law enforcement because it collects minimal data about its users and due to its own encryption protocols cannot read people’s messages, even if it wants to. The company has publicly released its responses to court orders showing that they have little or no information to provide.
“On the one hand, there are people who insist on ending coding, but on the other hand, there are people at the highest level in the U.S. government who use Signal to protect their own communications,” Marlinspike said. As of August, he said he was aware that at least some officials in the U.S. Senate, the White House and the Department of Homeland Security were using Signal.
But despite his belief that private businesses and governments are increasing threats to privacy, Marlinspike said he is optimistic that technology may be more responsible for users in the future. One trend that gives him hope is the recent wave of union efforts in Silicon Valley offices.
‘People [are] not only to organize material goals for themselves and their colleagues, but also to have creative control and conscientious use of the things they build, “he said. It makes me more hopeful. “
Ultimately, Marlinspike wants Signal’s encryption to be ubiquitous. With the nonprofit, other companies can adopt its open source coding protocol on a pay-as-you-go basis, and he hopes consumers’ obvious desire for privacy will encourage more programs to commit to coding.
“I think people care about privacy, it’s becoming clear,” Marlinspike said. “We are just trying to show that it is possible to develop technology in a different way.”