![]() ![]() Signal’s goal is to provide real people with robust privacy. It doesn’t matter how much I care about privacy and rigorous security hygiene: in the context of a messaging service, if my friends, colleagues, partner, and those I want to talk to don’t use a service, it is also useless to me. In Signal’s case, we also need to recognize that privacy is collective. ![]() So, for privacy reasons, we changed our system to not be P2P in all cases. For instance, many years ago Signal calls were always P2P, but people didn’t like that this would disclose IP address to whoever called you. Distributed or decentralized systems don’t increase privacy. Meredith Whittaker: Unlike almost all other consumer tech, Signal is designed so that nothing, including Signal’s servers, has access to your data. : Will the servers of Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Cloudflare no longer be used at some point so that they do not receive the IP address ( metadata)? Or will an onion routing protocol be implemented as an alternative? Will the server structure eventually change to be decentralized, which means peer-to-peer? Meredith Whittaker: Rarely used messengers are unfortunately useless This is where Signal emerged, and where it grew from a hypothesis project to the most widely used private messaging service on the planet. Signal’s founders and collaborators were primarily based in the US. On the question of geography, people don’t choose where they’re born, or where the intellectual and practitioner communities they work and grow with are located. This is core to Signal’s mission, and we take this mission extremely seriously. Meredith Whittaker: Unlike the majority of tech products and services, Signal doesn’t collect data about people, so the people who rely on Signal aren’t “entrusting” any data to Signal. : Why was it decided that the foundation and Signal Messenger LLC should be based in the USA? Due to the lack of data protection? To put it another way: After the Patriot Act and the Snowden revelations, why should you entrust your data to a company plus a foundation based in the USA? Meredith Whittaker: „ People don’t choose where they are born„ We offer our services for free, but instead of monetizing surveillance data from the backend, we ask the people who rely on Signal to contribute with a small contribution. And we chose this organizational form, and a reliance on donations, as a way to avoid and reject the dominant surveillance business model. We are incorporated as a 501c3 nonprofit, and as such we submit to an annual audit and publish our financial status publicly. ![]() Meredith Whittaker: Signal is entirely financed by donations, including a generous loan from Brian Acton. : It has been repeatedly criticized that the financing of Signal is partially non-transparent. Information about our organizational structure and governance model is publicly available for anyone interested. Meredith Whittaker: There seems to be some confusion at the heart of this question: Signal doesn’t have shares, or investors. Who is actually behind it today? Who owns the shares? Or is that not public? : I assume our readers will be happy to take note of that. I believe Signal is existential for the future, and I will do everything I can to ensure it grows and thrives and delivers on its strong privacy promises to the people who rely on it. However, I can say that it motivates me to ensure that Signal continues to exist as a robust, user-friendly messenger – and one that exists outside the web of corporate and government surveillance. Moxie is very committed to privacy, but I can’t speak to his inner motivation. Over the years, many talented people have contributed to building and maintaining Signal. Meredith Whittaker: Signal was founded in 2014 by Moxie Marlinspike and grew out of his Open Whisper Systems project. Whittaker, how did Signal emerge? With what motivation did this happen, who was involved? Meredith Whittaker on the history of Signal ![]()
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