Home » Why it is important to use (and defend) Signal

Why it is important to use (and defend) Signal

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In a historical phase in which privacy it is often considered an obstacle, no wonder that a encrypted messaging service such as Signal ends up in the viewfinder.

To condemn the use of applications that prevent law enforcement access messages and metadata of users are not only authoritarian regimes like China (which blocked the app last March), but also democracies like the United States or France and even some associations for children’s rights.

It is undeniable that criminals can exploit the privacy offered by Signal, but reading the matter through a single lens offers a decidedly distorted perspective: we would have accepted, before the Internet, the police opened and read every letter sent by post only because it could have contained criminal communications? Probably not.

In addition, Signal also offers protection to those who exploit privacy for much more noble reasons: Hong Kong activists, Black Lives Matter protesters and demonstrators against the coup in Myanmar are just some of the groups that have used this encrypted app to communicate and organize. The United Nations themselves have recommended the use of Signal to send journalists and NGOs evidence of abuses committed by totalitarian regimes.

The little Signal against the chat giants
For better or for worse, Signal (which has about 40 million users, compared to Telegram’s 400 million and Whatsapp’s over two billion) is the platform of choice for those who want to keep their conversations and metadata private. And this despite last December Cellebrite, an IT company that collaborates with the police, announced that it was able to extract Signal data present on a smartphone (statement strongly contested by the founder, Moxie Marlinspike) and the same could be also succeeded in the FBI.

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At least in principle, it cannot be excluded that law enforcement agencies find a way to access Signal messages (perhaps simply by unlocking the phone and reading the messages not deleted), but it would in any case be single episodes. In general, however, law enforcement agencies have no way of accessing this information: this is demonstrated by a 2016 case in which the FBI is suing the company, forcing it to provide the data of a person (but Signal was only in possession of the user’s registration date and his last use of the app).

Come reported also by the digital expert Vincenzo Cosenza, Signal is the only platform that does not collect any data on users, while Telegram (highly appreciated for the protection of privacy) collects 3, Whatsapp reaches 9 and Messenger even 14: this means that not only no one can know the content messages, but not even how many were sent, by whom, where or at what time.

The choice of Musk (and minister Colao)
It is for this reason that Signal is promoted by personalities of the caliber of Elon Musk O Edward snowden, is used by the staff of the European Commission and is also, as Italian Tech is able to reveal, the messaging system favorite of the Minister of Innovation, Vittorio Colao.

The trust placed in Signal also derives from the fact that it is developed by the non-profit Signal Foundation: being managed by a non-profit company (which it is financially supported by donations), the app created in 2014 has no reason to collect personal data; moreover, the Signal code is open source, which allows anyone to check for any hidden features.

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The security offered by Signal is therefore even higher than that of Telegram, which not only does not automatically offer end-to-end encryption (to take advantage of it you have to select the Secret Chat functionality from time to time), but has also raised some skepticism following the funding received indirectly from the Russian sovereign fund and directly from that of Abu Dhabi. In a nutshell, if for whatever reason you think it’s important that your conversations are as secure as possible, Signal is definitely the best option at the moment.

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