Curiio on Nostr: TDLR: I can't find anything about the US government investing $20m in to signal, ...

TDLR: I can't find anything about the US government investing $20m in to signal, centralisation has its place, they don't KYC, Brain Acton left WhatsApp due to concerns over how user data was handled and lost $850m because of it, we need apps like signal as they lower the barrier-to-entry for privacy and security and without them people would crawl further back into evil, proprietary hell!

On the point of government funding: it's used by people in government around the world including the US but I don't think the US invested $20m into it at any point. The Open Technology Foundation (which has received funding from the US government) donated to Open Whisper Systems (the company that behind Signal before the Signal Foundation) but it was well over 10 years ago and only $3m from what I can find.

Signal is centralised but this is more of a design choice. It's supposed to be simple, convenient and being centralised allows them to make all the decisions they like without having to worry about compatibility, reliability or a stagnant protocol they can't improve upon easily. I think it's a balance and important to have a good mix of both centralised and decentralised architectures. We have messaging platforms like Matrix and SimpleX if you need something more secure, private and censorship resistant but these aren't particularly user friendly for communicating with less technical people like my grandmother or neighbour.

Brian Acton did leave WhatsApp due to concerns over how data was used against users. He left before getting fully compensated and lost what is believed to be around $850m. He founded WhatsApp with a pretty strong ethos around anti-advertisment and anti-data collection so Signal aligns quite well with his mission from the start. But I agree selling it to Meta (or I guess Facebook at the time) was an immoral decision.

WhatsApp did adopt Signal's protocol around the time they were acquired though which is interesting. It's just their own privately maintained, backdoored version I guess.

But The Signal Foundation is a non-profit, not a data hungry company, and they have quite strong stances on privacy, security, client-side-scanning etc. I use a hardened client called Molly and the entire source code is auditable. I can guarantee it functions as they say it does. Signal is one of the most heavily scrutinised open source projects and constantly audited by independent security researchers, members of the public, AI agents and all sorts. If it were compromised I think you'd know about it quite quickly.

Signal is familiar to normies and extremely straightforward to use and setup. They really do their best to keep data to a minimum too. They pretty much just have the date you created your account and when you last connected to Signal; not who you've messaged, not your contacts, groupchats, call history or much else. That's pretty darn good.

Signal doesn't have KYC, they require a phone number and you're more than welcome to spoof it if you wish. In fact they're moving towards being able to register without a phone number as we speak. Their phone number requirement is more there for convenience (again part of making privacy and security accessible which is the only way we will achieve it) and also to prevent spam.

Is it the most private messaging app in the world: no. Is it possible Signal could be censored or shutdown due to it's centralised architecture: yes. Is it's documentation on how to setup the backend very easy to understand and self host: no it's almost impossible but you can audit it.

I'll take using Signal over WhatsApp, Facebook messenger or whatever awful messaging apps everybody else uses now days any time. Signal is pitching itself to a specific audience and it does a really good job at that. We need apps like Signal to act as a stepping stone for normal people because otherwise the technical barrier for them to access privacy becomes too high and this is moves them further and further into the hands of evil companies like Meta.