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Signal Is More Than Encrypted Messaging. Under Meredith Whittaker, It’s Out to Prove Surveillance Capitalism Wrong

On its 10th anniversary, Signal’s president 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 still a go-to app for hundreds of millions of people.

Since that July in 2014, Signal has transformed from a cypherpunk curiosity—created by an anarchist coder, run by a scrappy team working in a single room in San Francisco, spread word-of-mouth by hackers competing for paranoia points—into a full-blown, mainstream, encrypted communications phenomenon. Signal is a nonprofit because a for-profit structure leads to a scenario where one of my board members goes to Davos, talks to some guy, comes back excitedly telling me we need an AI strategy for profit. How do you disarm the massive platforms, draw down their cloud infrastructures, the fact that they control our media ecosystem, the entire nesting-doll of toxic technologies that we’re seeing from this, while building alternatives that actually interconnect the world?

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