Signal CEO Moxie Marlinspike sees new and growing products

• Signal, the encrypted messaging app, saw a wave of new users spurred by a growing appetite for online privacy, with endorsements from Elon Musk, Jack Dorsey and Edward Snowden.
• Signal is an unusual technological achievement: it’s a nonprofit organization with no plans to raise venture capital or profit from its success. Its encryption protocol is open-source and free.
• Signal CEO Moxie Marlinspike told Insider about the company’s future plans, including potential new product offerings, in a high-profile interview for Insider’s Transformers 2020 series in August, details of the conversation. complete not being published so far.
• “I actually think what we’re doing is extremely normal, and everything else is absolutely insane,” Marlinspike said of Signal’s commitment to privacy.
• Visit the Insider home page for more stories.

Signal definitely has a moment.

The encrypted messaging app has climbed to the top of the rankings for free app downloads on Google and Apple app stores, where it has floated for over a week. More than 7.5 million people installed Signal between Jan.6 and Jan.10 – a 4,200% increase from the previous week, according to Sensor Tower – spurred on by data policy changes at rival WhatsApp and approvals Elon Musk, Jack Dorsey and Edward Snowden.

But Signal is an unusual technological achievement. Owned by a nonprofit organization and funded by grants like WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton and the Knight Foundation, the app creator has not expressed any plans to raise venture capital or profit from his popularity. All the code he writes, including his basic encryption protocols, is open source and free to anyone.

Signal’s strength is its simplicity, according to co-founder and CEO Moxie Marlinspike. Signal’s open-source encryption allows people to send messages to individuals or groups that no one else – including Signal itself – can read, and the company also doesn’t share data on its users with third parties nor does it sell advertisements. This commitment to privacy is increasingly rare among messaging applications.

“I actually think what we’re doing is extremely normal, and everything else is absolutely insane,” Marlinspike said.

In an extensive interview in August, Marlinspike explained to Insider the origins of Signal and its meteoric rise over the past year, as well as its plans for the future. Snippets of the interview have been included in Insider’s Transformers 2020 series, but Marlinspike’s full remarks have not been released until now.

Marlinspike wants Signal to be a flagship of privacy, as other apps increasingly rely on monetizing users’ personal data. He sees a wave of shifts in public opinion towards tech companies, the optimism of the early 2010s usurped by growing consumer mistrust and the desire for privacy.

“When someone sends a message to their friend, their intention is not to also send that message to a conglomerate of advertisers, hackers, big tech companies. And people are always upset when they find out that it is. is not reality, ”Marlinspike said.

As Signal’s popularity increases, Marlinspike has hinted that the company may eventually move on to other products, beyond a messaging app.

When asked if Signal is exploring privacy-focused products for functions like web browsing, Marlinspike said Signal’s “ultimate goal” is to “grow to address other aspects of technology ”, but declined to go into more detail.

For now, he says, Signal is focused on dating the moment as hordes of new users flock to the app. As of October, the remote company first employed 36 people and its jobs page lists job postings for five new developer roles.

—Moxie Marlinspike (@moxie) January 14, 2021

“The era of utopian thought around technology is over”

Signal’s most recent increase in popularity was driven by news from rival WhatsApp that it could share users’ personal data with Facebook, its parent company. Telegram, another app that promises end-to-end encryption, saw a similar spike in users following WhatsApp’s announcement.

Prior to that, Signal downloads increased over the summer, with the app becoming a staple for organizers and protesters attending the Black Lives Matter protests, one of the biggest protest movements in state history. -United. Marlinspike also believes the shift to online activity amid COVID-19 lockdowns has accelerated people’s interest in online privacy.

“It’s important to realize that real change happens in private,” he said. “If you run out of truly private space, I think you’re sacrificing a lot.”

Signal’s origins go back to 2013, when Marlinspike quit his job at Twitter to found Open Whisper Systems. The nonprofit has focused on developing an encryption protocol that uses private keys to ensure that direct messages are only accessible to endpoints – not intercepted by app owners or third parties – without sacrificing user convenience. The Signal app was first launched in 2014.

One of the first companies to show interest in the Marlinspike project was, ironically, WhatsApp. In 2013, WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton recruited Marlinspike to integrate the Signal protocol into his app. Then, in 2014, Facebook bought WhatsApp and Acton finally left the company in 2017 “due to differences in customer data usage and targeted advertising.” While the WhatsApp messages themselves remain encrypted, the app keeps track of how often users log in and the phone numbers they use, among other data.

In 2018, Acton again partnered with Marlinspike to co-found The Signal Foundation, a non-profit organization that owns and operates the Signal app. Acton personally injected $ 50 million into the foundation, and she also received grants from the Shuttleworth Foundation, the Knight Foundation and the Open Technology Fund, supported by the US government. Individual users can also donate to the association through its website.

Signal is not about making money from its app, and Marlinspike considers nonprofit status essential to ensure that it “is beholden to no one other than interests of the Signal community ”. He told Insider he was confused by the profit models of other popular apps, which log user data in order to make more money from third-party advertisers and data brokers.

“There is this madness in the way everything is working right now,” he said. “Only a handful of companies have a huge amount of data on everyone – it’s a dangerous equation.”

Consumers are getting smarter at protecting their own privacy online, Marlinspike said, which is reflected in Signal’s growing popularity.

“The era of utopian thinking around technology is over – people no longer think of technology as something that will bring about this better and brighter future,” he said. “Instead, people are thinking more about the ways that technologies don’t actually serve them.”

Fending off new threats to privacy

While Marlinspike is wary of how corporate incentives can trick tech companies into exploiting people’s privacy, he is also wary of encryption threats generated by the public sector.

For most of the past decade, federal law enforcement officials in the Obama and Trump administrations have pressured tech companies to abandon end-to-end encryption.

At the urging of former Attorney General William Barr, Senate Republicans introduced a bill that would force tech companies to break encryption in response to law enforcement subpoenas, to an extent that , according to civil liberties groups, would be disastrous for online privacy.

Signal itself has become a target of frustration for law enforcement due to the fact that it collects minimal data on its users and, due to its own encryption protocols, cannot read messages from users. people even if he wishes. The company has publicly disclosed its responses to the court orders, showing that it has little or no information to provide.

“On the one hand, there are people pushing to end encryption, but on the other hand, there are people in the US government at the highest levels who use Signal to protect their own communication.” , Marlinspike said. In August, he said he was aware that at least some officials in the US Senate, the White House and the Department of Homeland Security were using Signal.

But despite his belief that privacy threats are drawing closer to both private companies and governments, Marlinspike said he was optimistic that the technology could become more accountable to its users in the future. One trend giving him hope is the recent wave of organizing efforts in offices in Silicon Valley.

“People [are] organize themselves around not only material goals for themselves and their colleagues, but also around creative control and conscientious use of the things they build, ”he said. gives me more hope.

Ultimately, Marlinspike wants Signal’s encryption to become ubiquitous. The nonprofit is allowing other businesses to adopt its open-source encryption protocol on a pay-as-you-go basis, and it hopes consumers’ obvious desire for privacy encourages more apps to come to its own. ‘engage in encryption.

“I think people care about privacy, it’s becoming clear,” Marlinspike said. “We’re just trying to demonstrate that it’s possible to develop technology in a different way.”