These days at the top of the charts of the most downloaded free applications, both on the App Store and on the Google Play Store, is Signal, a messaging app. In fact, many people have decided to download it after the users of WhatsApp, which is the most used messaging app in the world and belongs to Facebook, were notified on January 6 of an imminent update of its privacy policy.
Until now Signal was mainly used by journalists and activists who deal with online privacy or have a particular interest in protecting their communications, but also by officials of the European Commission. In fact, IT security experts consider the most secure messaging app from the point of view of privacy, both for how the cryptographic system is made that protects conversations from any external attempts to read them and because the app is designed to reduce minimum data collection.
On Sunday alone, around 810,000 people around the world installed Signal, according to data from the consulting firm Apptopia. A tweet from Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla and Space X, also contributed to the new popularity of the app: “Use Signal”. The message was echoed, among others, by Edward Snowden, a former NSA consultant and well-known whistleblower, who had said he was using Signal as early as 2015.
That's @signalapp, for those who don 't speak Elon. https://t.co/NA1PV9FN1o
– Edward Snowden (@Snowden) January 7, 2021
The problem with WhatsApp's privacy policy, in short
The first thing to say is that WhatsApp's new privacy policy, which will go into effect on February 8 and which is being talked about a lot, is not the same in the United States and in the member countries of the European Union. Outside the EU, the new terms for which WhatsApp is demanding approval will make it mandatory to share some of its users' data with Facebook, for commercial purposes and to improve the user experience.
On the other hand, for Italy and the other countries where the GDPR, the European regulation for the protection of personal data, one of the most advanced privacy laws in the world, is in force, no major changes have been made regarding privacy. Only a few rules on the WhatsApp section for retailers and commercial services have been changed: they should allow companies to communicate with their customers via WhatsApp. However, one thing worth pointing out is that even in EU countries, WhatsApp has been sharing some user data with Facebook for years. However, it cannot do so for commercial or marketing purposes, as it does elsewhere, but only for technical and security purposes.
To understand better, here we have explained all the changes with more words.
Because there are those who prefer Signal (also to Telegram)
Signal has been developed since 2013 by a group of privacy activists and it is supported by a non-profit organization, the Signal Foundation. It is financed, among others, by Brian Acton: founder of WhatsApp, he left it in 2017 because he did not agree with the management of Facebook, which had bought it three years earlier. The fact that the app is run by a non-profit organization is one of the reasons Signal is valued: the Signal Foundation is funded by donations and has no intention of using the data in its possession to generate advertising revenue. , such as Google and Facebook.
At the head of the Signal Foundation is Moxie Marlinspike, a cryptography expert who has played a very important role in the development of many popular digital tools: he is one of the authors of the Signal Protocol, the open end-to-end encryption system source on which the cryptographic systems of WhatsApp, Messenger and Skype are based. From 2011 to 2013 Marlinspike – whose real name is Matthew Rosenfeld – also worked as the head of security for Twitter.
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Signal is also based on the Signal Protocol, and moreover its code is open source, so any programming expert in the world can see how it works and judge its safety. This is not the case, however, for the WhatsApp code.
End-to-end encryption systems ensure that conversations between users of messaging apps can only be seen by the sender and receiver. Not even app managers can see them: this applies both to WhatsApp, for example, and to Signal. But Signal, unlike WhatsApp and even Telegram, does not even keep the metadata of conversations, that is, information on where, when and with whom its users communicated. Another difference with Telegram is that the latter does not apply end-to-end encryption to all conversations of its users: it is an option that must be activated, transforming a chat into a secret chat. The same goes for Facebook Messenger.
An interesting function of Signal (and this one shares it with Telegram, as far as secret chats are concerned) is that which allows users to set the automatic destruction of each of their messages a few minutes or a few seconds after sending.
However, there are some criticisms of Signal. For example, there are those who believe that it is not a good idea for the app to use the user's phone number as a username to identify them. The reason for this choice is that it allows each user to find his personal contacts through the address book of his phone, which is a set of data owned by him – while the usernames chosen on most social networks or email services do part of a database of operators. In short, there are no user contact lists in the Signal servers.
You can choose not to use phone numbers for your contacts (some don't like it as a solution), but in that case you must necessarily set a PIN code, which has attracted more criticism to Signal: since when the function to set exists PINs, introduced this summer, the app's servers have begun to store some information about users, albeit encrypted. This changes little in terms of vulnerability of user accounts, but many experts have felt that by doing so, Signal has changed its philosophy.
– Read also: Why WhatsApp is important for Facebook
For those who still want to download it: from here you can get the version for Android devices, while from here you can get the version for iOS devices.
