Why I started using Signal (thanks to WhatsApp)

How did I get to know this messaging app.

Photo by NordWood Themes on Unsplash

This article is the English version; if you are interested in the Italian version, you can find it here: Perché ho iniziato a usare Signal (grazie a WhatsApp)

From the beginning of this year, starting WhatsApp, the app show a message regarding an update of the privacy policy that should come effective from 8 February 2021.

The expected privacy update, as indicated and explained later by WhatsApp itself, would not have involved the privacy of messages exchanged with friends or family, but only that of messages exchanged with companies to provide greater transparency on how they were collected and used the data itself.

Furthermore, these changes would not have involved European and United Kingdom users in any case as they are protected by the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation), European legislation regarding data protection, and whose sanctions, for the most severe cases, arrive at 4% of the company’s worldwide revenue (of the whole group), so a sanction of this type can also become relevant for groups such as Facebook/Google/Amazon.

However, the attempts at clarification have not served to calm the controversies arising from this update; furthermore, the lack of clarity meant that the Privacy Guarantor (Italian, I have not investigated for other countries) asked for clarification and decided to bring the matter to the attention of the EDPB (European Data Protection Board).

Faced with all the problems and confusion created, WhatsApp has decided to postpone the effective date of the new privacy policy from the previous date of February 8, 2021, to May 15, 2021, as you can see from the related post on their blog.

Musk’s tweet

The message shown by WhatsApp was not clear, and in addition to the discontent and confusion created to the users of the app, it is also added a tweet from Elon Musk:

Use Signal
@elonmusk — January 7, 2021

Some did not understand what he meant (and many even made fun of him); Edward Snowden also intervened to clarify:

That’s @signalapp, for those who don’t speak Elon.
@Snowden — January 7, 2021

Both Musk’s tweet and WhatsApp’s lack of clarity have pushed more and more users to look for alternatives.

A curiosity about the Musk’s tweet, a company that had nothing to do with it, but which simply had a similar name, the Signal Advance had a huge benefit for this, going from a rating of 0.60 dollars (January 6) to a peak of 38.70 dollars (January 11), while today (January 17) it has stabilized around 13.50 dollars.

Alternatives to WhatsApp

The two main alternatives were:

Signal, the app mentioned by Musk’s tweet, is the app that I too started using (not exclusively):

1. It is open-source (for which the source code is present on GitHub and verifiable).
2. Do not save data on company servers.
3. Proprietary encryption is applied to each message/call; this proprietary encryption is the same that is also used by WhatsApp; the main difference compared to WhatsApp is precisely on the previous point.
4. It is a non-profit company, so it can never be purchased by one of the large technology companies, as it happened in 2014 for WhatsApp by Facebook, I am reporting an interesting link from Wikipedia regarding non-profit companies in general.
5. On Android, it also allows you to replace the messaging app for SMS / MMS (not tested); in this case, however, the SMS / MMS will not be encrypted.

Telegram, a very famous and widespread alternative to WhatsApp.

In addition, there are also the following more privacy-oriented alternatives to WhatsApp (and they won’t be the only ones), but I haven’t had the opportunity to try them:

1. Session
2. Threema
3. Wire
4. Wickr Me— A curiosity about this app is that it was also used in the Mr. Robot series.

What I liked about Signal

In the few days of using Signal, I was comfortable with it; it has everything you would expect from a current messaging app, including:

• Smartphone app (for both Android and iPhone), clean and functional
• desktop client, in this case, to be taken into consideration that the previous one will not be synchronized but only what has been done from the moment of association onwards (the Web client is not present as it would probably be difficult to synchronize).
• It is also possible to configure messages that are deleted after a customizable time (such as, for example, also present on WhatsApp with ephemeral messages).
• It is also possible to use Signal for personal notes (shopping list, link, or whatever); in fact, among the contacts, there is one with our number for this purpose (this was also feasible on WhatsApp even if not directly, creating a group of two people and then letting the other person out)
• You can add emoticons in response to individual messages (not present in this case on WhatsApp but similar feature view on Slack)
• Calls and video calls

What I did not like

This does not mean which, however, is free from defects; the main one, unfortunately, is precisely that relating to its diffusion, not many of my contacts have it, just to give a few numbers, from the events of the beginning of the year Signal has exceeded 50 million active users a few days ago, practically a tenth of Telegram users (which has just surpassed 500 million active users, earning 25 million in a few days), also both are far from WhatsApp users whose number of monthly active users amounts to over 2 billion.

Furthermore, just a few days (January 15th), there was another problem, but which I consider negligible, they had technical issues deriving from unexpected traffic peaks given by the enormous success they had in a short time.

What about the future?

I will continue to use it as much as possible, advertising it; at the moment, for my need, it is not able to replace WhatsApp, but for the future who knows.

Thanks for reading; if you liked it (or even if you didn’t like it) or if you have any considerations about it, let me know in the comments.