But they’ve been resistant to even considering what a policy might look like.” “It’s not only that Signal doesn’t have these policies in place.
“The world needs products like Signal - but they also need Signal to be thoughtful,” said Gregg Bernstein, a former user researcher who left the organization this month over his concerns. “They’ve been resistant to even considering what a policy might look like.”Įmployees worry that, should Signal fail to build policies and enforcement mechanisms to identify and remove bad actors, the fallout could bring more negative attention to encryption technologies from regulators at a time when their existence is threatened around the world. But those warnings have largely gone unheeded, they told me, as the company has pursued a goal to hit 100 million active users and generate enough donations to secure Signal’s long-term future. In the months leading up to and following the 2020 US presidential election, Signal employees raised questions about the development and addition of new features that they fear will lead the platform to be used in dangerous and even harmful ways. And they have bad societal outcomes.” Signal’s mission, by contrast, is to promote privacy through end-to-end encryption, without any commercial motive.īut Signal’s rapid growth has also been a cause for concern. “And a lot of that insanity, to us, is the result of bad business models that produce bad technology. “We’re organized as a nonprofit because we feel like the way the internet currently works is insane,” CEO Moxie Marlinspike told me. And while Signal still has a small fraction of the market for mobile messaging - Telegram, another upstart messenger, says it added 90 million active users in January alone - the rapid growth has been a cause for excitement inside the small distributed team that makes the app.Īdding millions of users has served as a vindication for a company that has sought to build a healthier internet by adopting different incentives than most Silicon Valley companies. While the company won’t confirm the size of its user base, a second employee told me the app has now surpassed 40 million users globally. 1 in the app stores of 70 countries, and it continues to rank near the top of most of them, including the United States. “The world needs products like Signal - but they also need Signal to be thoughtful.”
#THE SIGNAL STATE UPDATE#
But in a 12-hour period the Sunday after WhatsApp’s privacy policy update began, Signal added another 2 million users, an employee familiar with the matter told me. Last month, according to one research firm, the six-year-old app had about 20 million users worldwide.
Among the biggest beneficiaries has been Signal, the encrypted messaging app whose development is funded by a nonprofit organization. In the meantime, though, tens of millions of users began seeking alternatives to Facebook’s suite of products. The resulting furor sparked a backlash that led Facebook-owned WhatsApp to delay the policy from taking effect until May. The changes were designed to enable businesses to send and store messages to WhatsApp’s 2 billion-plus users, but they came with an ultimatum: agree by February 8th, or you can no longer use the app. On January 6th, WhatsApp users around the world began seeing a pop-up message notifying them of upcoming changes to the service’s privacy policy.