Signal, by contrast, cannot comply with law enforcement even if it wanted to. In some cases including when they believe it’s necessary to keep users safe or comply with legal processes, they state, “we may collect, use, preserve, and share user information” including “information about how some users interact with others on our service.” Yet it does have the technical capacity to do so. WhatsApp states on its website that it does not store logs of who is messaging who, “in the ordinary course of providing our service”. “Historically, when an investigative journalist’s source is prosecuted in retaliation for something they have printed, prosecutors will go after metadata logs and call logs about who’s been calling whom,” says Harlo Holmes, the director of newsroom digital security at the Freedom of the Press Foundation. But on Signal, unlike on WhatsApp, your messages’ metadata are encrypted, meaning that even authorities with a warrant cannot obtain your address book, nor see who you’re talking to and when, nor see your messages. At their core, both apps use cryptography to make sure that the messages, images and videos they carry can only be seen by the sender and the recipient - not governments, spies, nor even the designers of the app itself. But it is increasingly clear that among protesters, dissidents and investigative journalists, Signal is the new gold standard because of how little data it keeps about its users. Signal’s user base - somewhere in the tens of millions, according to app store data - is still a fraction of its main competitor WhatsApp’s, which has some 2 billion users and is owned by Facebook. It’s a continuation of our ongoing mission to protect privacy.” “I would say that right now it’s just congruent.
“I don’t know if I would say more,” he says.
Days later, in a blog post titled “Encrypt your face,” the Signal Foundation announced it would begin distributing face masks to protesters, “to help support everyone self-organizing for change in the streets.” Asked if the chaos of 2020 has pushed Signal to become a more outwardly activist organization, Acton pauses. In June, Signal took its most explicitly activist stance yet, rolling out a new feature allowing users to blur people’s faces in photos of crowds. Read more: Young Activists Drive Peaceful Protests Across the U.S. “Signal and other end-to-end encryption technology have become vital tools in protecting organizers and activists.”
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“We’re seeing a lot more people attending their first actions or protests this year-and one of the first things I tell them to do is download Signal,” says Jacky Brooks, a Chicago-based activist who leads security and safety for Kairos, a group that trains people of color to use digital tools to organize for social change. (The Signal Foundation, the non-profit that runs the app, doesn’t share official download numbers for what it says are privacy reasons.) In Hong Kong they rose by 1,000% over the same period, coinciding with Beijing’s imposition of a controversial national security law.
between March and August compared to the prior six months, according to data shared with TIME by the analysis firm App Annie, which tracks information from the Apple and Google app stores. Indeed, just as protests against systemic racism and police brutality intensified this year, downloads of Signal surged across the country.
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