Under Meredith Whittaker, Signal Is Out to Prove Surveillance Capitalism Wrong
https://www.wired.com/story/meredith-whittaker-signal/
Under Meredith Whittaker, Signal Is Out to Prove Surveillance Capitalism Wrong
https://www.wired.com/story/meredith-whittaker-signal/
7 Comments
On its 10th anniversary, Signal’s president Meredith Whittaker wants to remind you that the world’s most secure communications platform is a nonprofit. It’s free. It doesn’t track you or serve you ads. It pays its engineers very well. And it’s a go-to app for hundreds of millions of people. And because of all that, it’s unlike anything else that’s out there—and they plan on keeping it that way.
“I think people need to reframe their understanding of the tech industry, understanding how surveillance is so critical to its business model. And then understand how Signal stands apart, and recognize that we need to expand the space for that model to grow,” Whittaker tells WIRED’s Andy Greenberg.
Signal is, in many ways, the exact opposite of the Silicon Valley model. It’s a nonprofit that has never taken investment, makes its product available for free, has no advertisements, and collects virtually no information on its users—while competing with tech giants and winning. In a world where Elon Musk seems to have proven that practically no privately owned communication forum is immune from a single rich person’s whims, Signal stands as a counterfactual: evidence that venture capitalism and surveillance capitalism—hell, capitalism, period—are not the only paths forward for the future of technology.
Read The Big Interview here: [https://www.wired.com/story/meredith-whittaker-signal/](https://www.wired.com/story/meredith-whittaker-signal/)
Where do they get money to pay employees and run servers?
I found it funny that right outta the gates it’s like “it’s an encrypted communications phenomenon!” and goes right to “Drake loves it!”
Lol shouldn’t they detain and arrest her too, since Signal is widely used by criminals (including politicians in Bruxelles) the same way Telegram is?
lol. None of it is secure unless there is a secure device that runs the app. As of now there isn’t one on the market. Your devices can be mirrored at will, any time, almost anywhere, turned on or off.
They shot themselves in the foot by dropping SMS integration. Any headway I was making with getting others to use it dissipated once the easy road to trying it out was abandoned. I get that SMS isn’t secure, but they didn’t even try to maintain some form of “SMS to Signal convert” pipeline, and too many people want just one “text” app regardless of the points I raise about why Signal is better.
I hate when people add little qualifiers to the word capitalism. It always serves to defend capitalism as if capitalism wasn’t the problem. “It’s not capitalism, it’s all this stuff that evolved organically out of capitalism that it does all the time and will forever be inseparable from it. It’s crony capitalism. Surveillance capitalism. Corporate capitalism. Neo-liberal capitalism. Laisse Fare capitalism.” It’s all capitalism.