Signal Gives You a Choice for Privacy
At the start of the fantasy football season, my league organized a WhatApp group chat. We all understood that a messaging app was the best way to send messages across our devices. As an iPhone owner I was fine with avoiding the Android green bubble that accompanies texts outside of Apple’s ecosystem, however, I was a little concerned over my data and privacy. I’ve heard rumors that Facebook, which is the parent company to WhatsApp, collects all the data within the app and possibly more outside of it. Understanding these types of concerns, Signal takes a new approach on an old service.
Signal is a standard messaging app. It works across platforms, like iPhone and Android, and it can send messages, files, voice notes, images, and videos either one-one-one or to a group. The feature that makes it different from its competitors is encryption. This one difference rattles the industry to its core.
Through the course of providing messaging services, WhatsApp stores the data on its servers. Some of this data is saved, such as diagnostic data that helps improve the service, and some of it is purged, such as message content. Signal takes a different approach by not storing data and encrypting all of the messages. Signal contends that there are two ways to protect data. The first is WhatsApp’s approach — save data to company computers and protect the computers from malicious attacks. This strategy has varying degrees of success. We are all familiar with the periodic email sent from our favorite online retailer informing us that our data was compromised. The second is Signal’s approach — protect the data with encryption. In this case, Signal does not store the data nor can Signal read it. While encrypting messages is beneficial to the user, it comes at a cost to the company.
Signal’s founder Moxie Marlinspike has said that bad business models lead to bad outcomes, and conversely good business models lead to good outcomes. The standard practice for tech companies is to offer “free” services in exchange for your data and content. It is necessary for these companies to generate revenue in order to offer these services and data collection has proven the best way. To fundamentally challenge this business model, Signal organized as a non-profit, operating on donations from its users. In this way the company does not need to be driven by profits, shareholders, or Wall Street. It sidesteps in the incentives built into a for-profit business model and can stick to its mission statement.
Signal isn’t merely a service. It is a cultural shift for the industry. If Signal can reach its sustainability threshold of 100 million users (it currently has about 20 million), it could prove the non-profit concept. Additionally, Signal could reclaim the idea of private conversations. In the Age of Information, pushed forward by the COVID lockdowns, many of the places where people would gather to discuss ideas have moved to virtual spaces. People need a space where they can privately present, challenge, and refine ideas without fear of punishment or censorship. Private conversations were the incubator for the American Revolution and is part of the DNA of this country. Only in private were the colonists able to discuss radical ideas, such as popular sovereignty and self governance. In today’s constantly changing world, maybe Signal will promote innovative ideas to our biggest and most challenging problems.
