- WhatsApp recently announced its ultimatum on policy change.
- Signal came to the fore after Elon Musk tweeted it as a replacement.
- Signal employees raised concerns over development and feature implementation.
WhatsApp users around the world started seeing a pop-up alert on January 6th. It notified them of imminent changes to the privacy policy of the service. The modifications were designed to allow corporations to send and store messages to the 2 billion-plus WhatsApp users. Moreover, it came with an ultimatum to either accept by 8 February, or you can no longer use the app.
An outcry caused the ensuing furor that forced Facebook-owned WhatsApp to postpone the policy from taking effect until May. However, in the meantime, tens of millions of users have started to search for alternatives to the product suite of Facebook. Signal is an encrypted messaging app. Last month, the six-year-old app had around 20 million users worldwide, according to one research company. But Signal added another 2 million users in a 12-hour span the Sunday after WhatsApp’s privacy policy update began, an employee familiar with the matter told me. It was accompanied by days of temporary outages.
Rise of Signal
Ever since the pace has hardly relented. Signal soared to No. 1 in 70 countries’ app stores, and it continues to rank at the top of most, including the United States. While the business could not disclose the size of its user base, a second employee told me that the app has already reached 40 million worldwide users. And while Signal only has a small fraction of the mobile messaging market, Telegram, another upstart messenger, says it added 90 million active users in January alone, the rapid growth within the small dispersed team that produces the app has been a cause for excitement. Adding millions of users has served as a vindication for a business that has tried to establish a healthy internet by embracing distinct rewards than other businesses in Silicon Valley.
Signal’s fast growth was a cause for concern as well. Signal workers raised concerns about the development and implementation of new features. They believe that these would enable the platform to be used in risky and even harmful ways. This was in the months leading up to and after the US presidential election in 2020. But, they told me, those alerts have largely gone unheeded, as the company has followed a target of reaching 100 million active users and raising enough donations to ensure the long-term future of Signal.
Signal’s Policies and Compliance Mechanisms
Employees worry that the fallout could bring more negative exposure to encryption technology from regulators at a time when their existence is challenged around the world if Signal continues to develop policies and compliance mechanisms to detect and eliminate bad actors.
Interviews with current and former employees portray an organization that is justly proud of its role in promoting privacy. Meanwhile, it is still actively ignoring questions about the possible abuse of its service. Their comments raise the issue of a business conceived as a reprimand for a data-hungry, ad-funded networking tools.
