Why Signal won’t compromise on encryption, with president Meredith Whittaker

Today we're sharing an episode of Decoder with Nilay Patel featuring an interview with Meredith Whittaker, president of Signal. Signal is the popular messaging app that offers encrypted communication. You might recognize Meredith’s name from 2018 when she was an AI researcher at Google and one of the organizers of the Google walkout. Now she’s at Signal, which is a little different than the usual tech company: it’s operated by a nonprofit foundation and prides itself on collecting as little data as possible. Listen to more of Decoder with Nilay Patel anywhere you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by On Investing, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. Each week, hosts Lizanne Saunders, Schwab's Chief Investment Strategist, and Colin Martin, Head of Fixed Income Research and Strategy for the Schwab Center for Financial Research, bring you fresh insights on what's happening in the markets and why, and what the implications might be for your portfolio. Join Colin and Lizanne as they explore questions like, how do you evaluate corporate bonds that look interesting? And what sectors are on the move right now? Download the latest episode and subscribe at schwab.com/oninvesting or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 0:45Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by On Investing, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. Each week, hosts Lizanne Saunders, Schwab's Chief Investment Strategist, and Colin Martin, Head of Fixed Income Research and Strategy for the Schwab Center for Financial Research, bring you fresh insights on what's happening in the markets and why, and what the implications might be for your portfolio. Join Colin and Lizanne as they explore questions like, how do you evaluate corporate bonds that look interesting? And what sectors are on the move right now? Download the latest episode and subscribe at schwab.com/oninvesting or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:31Nilay Patel?

  Hey, Vergecast listeners, it's Neelai. Our regular Wednesday show is off this week, so I wanted to share an episode of Decoder that I did recently with Meredith Whitaker. She's the President of Signal, the encrypted messaging app. If you're a Vergecast listener, you're going to like this conversation. It's a whole show about messaging apps, after all. Signal has way different priorities than Google and Apple. Meredith is going to explain all that to you during the show. We'll be back on Friday to talk about all the news from the week, but in the meantime, here is my chat on Decoder with Meredith Whitaker, President of Signal.

• 2:01Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Neelai Patel, editor in chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today, I'm talking to Meredith Whittaker. She's the president of Signal. That's the popular messaging app that offers encrypted communication. Now, you might recognize Meredith's name from a different context. In 2018, she was an AI researcher at Google and one of the organizers of the Google walkout, during which 20,000 employees protested the company's handling of sexual misconduct. Meredith also protested the company's work on military contracts before ultimately leaving Google in 2019. Now, she's at Signal, which is a little different than the usual big tech company. It's operated by a nonprofit foundation, and it prides itself on collecting as little data as possible.

• 2:46Nilay Patel?

  For that reason, Signal is popular with journalists, with activists, people who care about their privacy. Signal even popped up in the Elon versus Twitter trial because Elon was using it. But messaging apps, especially encrypted messaging apps, are a complicated business. Governments around the world really dislike encrypted messaging and often push companies to put in backdoors for surveillance and law enforcement. Because, yeah, criminals use encrypted messaging for all sorts of deeply evil things. But the thing is, there's no half-step to breaking encryption. You either have it, or you don't. So companies like Signal often find themselves in the difficult position of refusing to help governments. You might recall that Apple has refused to help the FBI break into iPhones, for example.

• 3:30Nilay Patel?

  I wanted to know how that trade-off plays out at Signal's much smaller scale and with Signal's much more idealistic mission. Then there's just the basic reality of messaging apps. You have to get users. You have to have enough people on the platform so that the network is really valuable. So you choose Signal to message someone instead of something else. You have to add features. You have to have customer support, the whole thing. Signal just added Stories, like every other app in the world. I wanted to know how they generate ideas like that without being able to track any user behavior. And I wanted to know how the fight to take users from Apple's iMessage and Meta's WhatsApp is going. Other companies like Google have struggled mightily to compete, after all. Signal just dropped support for SMS on Android, and then we talked about that trade-off and what it means for users.

• 4:13Nilay Patel?

  And if the company can support the new RCS standard that Google is pushing quite hard. Lastly, we talked about Meredith's biggest decision as president, helping to hire a new full-time CEO for Signal. And of course, I asked why she's not just taking the job herself. This is a really good episode with a lot of Decoder themes in the mix. Honestly, we have to start doing checklists or something. Okay, Meredith Whittaker, president of Signal. Here we go.

• 4:50Nilay Patel?

  Meredith Whittaker, you are the president of Signal. Welcome to Decoder.

• 4:55Speaker 02

  Thank you. It is wonderful to be here.

• 4:57Nilay Patel?

  There is quite a lot to talk about. The messaging market is pretty ferocious. The encrypted messaging market has lots of complication with it. Signal is a really interesting company. It's structured in an interesting way. One of your jobs as president is to hire a CEO, which is itself interesting and a pretty fascinating Decoder question. But let's start with the very basics. Explain what Signal is and where it fits into the messaging universe.

• 5:23Speaker 02

  Absolutely. Signal is the most widely used, truly private messaging app on the market. It's used by millions and millions of people globally. And for people who use Signal, it may feel similar to other messaging apps. You open it, you send a meme, you get party directions. You know, you close it when you're done talking to your friends. But below the surface, Signal is very different. It is truly private. We go to great lengths, not only to keep the contents of your messages, who you're talking to, et cetera, private, but to keep, you know, to collect as little data as possible while providing a functional service.

• 6:08Speaker 02

  So we differ from our competitors in that our mission is to provide a private app and in that, you know, we are not in any way connected to the surveillance business model. So we have a very different model and a very different mission.

• 6:24Nilay Patel?

  Signal is really interesting because it has this nonprofit foundation that sits over the top of it. One of the reasons the surveillance business model exists is because that is an easy way to make a lot of money. Signal is obviously not doing that. There is this nonprofit. How is it structured? How does it all work?

• 6:39Speaker 02

  The Signal Foundation is a nonprofit. The Signal Messenger LLC is part, is under that nonprofit umbrella and the foundation exists solely to support the messaging app. So in kind of more colloquial terms, we can think of Signal as a nonprofit. It is a nonprofit, which means, you know, we don't have shareholders. We don't have equity. So we are not being structurally incentivized to prioritize profit and growth over our core mission. And you're not going to see a billion dollar exit coming. So, you know, we're not just biding our time until we can get rich and move to a super yacht. So it's a, you know, it is a different

• 7:19Speaker 02

  structure. It is a different model. That doesn't mean it's any cheaper to develop Signal than it is to develop a high availability surveillance messaging service. We are counting on, you know, a sustainability model that relies on donations and relies on a more nonprofit model than on a model where we are secretly monetizing data in the background or otherwise, again, participating in the surveillance business model, which is the dominant paradigm across the tech industry.

• 7:47Nilay Patel?

  Across the tech industry, but not so much in messaging specifically. I actually want to just push on that a little bit. There are obviously messaging services that look at everything that you send across their service and then aggressively try to monetize you based on what you're saying. Specifically, I'm thinking of dating apps, which really read all of your messages to figure out when they should nudge you into going on a date, which every time I hear about it, just strikes me as completely bonkers, but that's their universe. Some of your competitors, though, your head up competitors, iMessage, WhatsApp, those are fully encrypted. Obviously WhatsApp is owned by Facebook. There's a lot of controversy there. There's a connection to Signal with Brian Acton, who was a co-founder of WhatsApp, now on the Signal board. But those are inherently encrypted, right? They're not reading your

• 8:31Nilay Patel?

  messages in the way that, you know, the surveillance business model is predicated on collecting a lot of data. What is the difference in your mind between the two things?

• 8:39Speaker 02

  Right. Well, let's take WhatsApp as a specific example, right? You know, again, WhatsApp uses the Signal encryption protocol to provide Encryption for its messages. And that was absolutely a visionary choice. And, you know, something that Brian and his team led back in the day. So, you know, big props to them for doing that. But you can't just look at that and you can't just stop at message protection. Right? WhatsApp does not protect metadata the way that Signal does. Um, so if Signal knows nothing about who you are, doesn't have your profile information, introduced, you know, groups, encryption protections so that we don't know who you're

• 9:20Speaker 02

  talking to or who the membership of a group is, has gone above and beyond to minimize the collection of metadata. WhatsApp, on the other hand, you know, collects the information about, you know, your profile information, your profile photo, who's talking to whom, who is a group member. And that is powerful metadata. It's particularly powerful. And this is where we have to back out into kind of a structural argument for a company to collect that data that is also owned by Meta slash Facebook. So Facebook has a huge amount, just, you know, unspeakable volumes of intimate information about billions of people across the globe. And so it is not, you know, it is, it's not trivial to point out that WhatsApp metadata

• 10:04Speaker 02

  could easily be joined with Facebook data, could easily reveal extremely intimate information about people. And the choice to remove or enhance the encryption protocols is still in the hands of Facebook. So we have to look structurally at, you know, what that organization is, who actually has control over these decisions and, you know, and look at some of these details that don't often get discussed when we talk about sort of message encryption overall. You know, Signal, again, is a nonprofit. We don't have any access to data like Facebook. We avoid having access to that data. We don't buy, sell, trade your data. So it's, you know, it is a different paradigm.

• 10:45Speaker 02

  And I think we can't, you know, we can't point to WhatsApp, however slick their marketing is, and say that is truly secure and private. Because, you know, all of these details add up to us needing to conclude that it is not. Well, you know, Signal exists solely for that purpose.

• 11:00Nilay Patel?

  Let me ask you a hard question there. You have a long history as a critic of big tech.

• 11:05Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 11:05Nilay Patel?

  You, you obviously believe in these criticisms of big tech. I don't believe that while you were the president of Signal. You're going to switch the business model. Mark Zuckerberg has his own reputation and he can say things about privacy and people can believe whether Facebook is, or whether Meta is going to do those things based on their evaluation of Mark Zuckerberg. How do you actually audit the service as a consumer? How do I actually make sure that what you're saying is true?

• 11:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, Signal makes its code open source. It makes the Signal protocol and the key cryptographic primitives that we use to ensure privacy and security open for review. So, you know, a big part of our model is telling people not to take our word for it. The people who do have the specialized training and skill have engaged, you know, thousands and thousands of hours poring over our code. There are people in the Signal community forums who every time we have a new, you know, a new kind of piece of code that drops on GitHub, sort of look at it, comment on it, deduce what features might be coming through that. So there is an active and vigilant community that actually sort of checks Signal's claims

• 12:11Speaker 02

  against the code, against the cryptographic protocol we use. And time and time again, you know, our cryptographic protocol, again, is not just used by Signal, right? This is what Facebook uses, which other companies have chosen to use because, you know, it's the best. We rely on that vigilant community and we rely on transparency and the kind of community auditing. So we-

• 12:34Nilay Patel?

  But that's the protocol, right? That's not the app.

• 12:37Speaker 02

  That is the app.

• 12:38Nilay Patel?

  The whole app?

• 12:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's open source.

• 12:40Nilay Patel?

  So if I just want to fork Signal and make my own Signal, I can just take the code and do it today?

• 12:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, people do it. There are many of those. We don't, you know, because we can't guarantee them.

• 12:49Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 12:50Speaker 02

  Because we can't validate them, because we don't have the time or the resources for that. We don't endorse them. Yeah, but there are many out there.

• 12:57Nilay Patel?

  That's really cool.

• 12:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 12:58Nilay Patel?

  Uh, let me ask another question just about the structure here. So it's a nonprofit, you said you don't have equity. Facebook, in a different time, Facebook equity was very valuable. Maybe not so much today as we speak, but in a different time, Facebook equity is really valuable. So Facebook, Apple, Google, whoever would pay a high base salary and then give engineers a ton of equity. So if you work really hard, the stock price will go up, you'll get rich. You don't have that key. Are you just paying people more in cash? Or are you hoping that people take a discount because they believe in your values?

• 13:27Speaker 02

  Well, we are, we do have competitive salaries. I think that's part of Signal as an organization also has a labor politics. We want to make sure we're compensating people. We want to make sure that, you know, people aren't being asked to sacrifice their lives, their standard of living to come work for Signal. We want to hire the best people we can find. So we do have competitive salaries. Of course, we don't have equity. So that's not part of the package, but we are a fully distributed organization. So there is, you know, flexibility with where you live, which communities you might be able to live in. And there is also, you know, we have, we have other benefits that we think make it a great working environment for people who want to apply their talents to something outside

• 14:09Speaker 02

  of the surveillance tech ecosystem.

• 14:13Nilay Patel?

  But on a straight comp basis, are you, do you match big tech? Or are you lower or where are you?

• 14:18Speaker 02

  I mean, I don't have a spreadsheet in front of me and big tech is a big amorphous entity. So big tech in Europe or big tech in Palo Alto, there are a lot of variables there. But what I can say straight up is we are competitive.

• 14:31Nilay Patel?

  How many people are at Signal right now?

• 14:32Speaker 02

  About 40 total. That's the org.

• 14:36Nilay Patel?

  And how is that structured? Is that mostly engineers? Is it policy people? Is it the C suite? How's that work?

• 14:41Speaker 02

  It's mostly engineers. We have a, you know, it's not a very complex organization by which, you know, I'm avoiding using the term flat because it is not flat, but it doesn't have, you know, many layers of bureaucracy. There's a, a leadership team. We have a, a COO. We have myself as president. We have a director of products. We have two engineering executives, one that looks more at architecture, one that looks more at people management, and then we have Brian Acton as a acting CEO. I'm like imagining in my head the kind of org chart right now.

• 15:14Nilay Patel?

  That's the whole show. That's what we do here, by all means.

• 15:16Speaker 02

  It's primarily developers, but of course, like, development isn't just sort of, you know, submitting a pull request, right? We also have a really talented, you know, what we call the user voice team, and those are the people who engage with the community. Those are the people who, you know, do a little bit of QA, test for bugs. I am tasked in my new role with sort of bringing policy awareness. So we don't have a policy team, but that's, you know, that is something I'm, you know, I'm working on what the right calibration there is for Signal and kind of bringing in my network and my many years of work on those topics. And then we have, you know, what I'll characterize as like a narrative team. You know, we have writers, we have people who, you know, think about how we translate kind of arcane concepts

• 15:57Speaker 02

  to people who rely on Signal in a way that they'll actually understand. And, you know, we have folks like that. But it is primarily developers because what we do is produce a high availability app across three platforms, which takes a lot of labor, constant vigilance, constantly squashing bugs, constantly thinking about new features, making sure there's parity across all the versions. It is, you know, it is endless and difficult work. And I'm, you know, I'm happy to be working with the people who are doing it.

• 16:26Nilay Patel?

  You have a new role at Signal, President of Signal, new role for you. I don't think you were the President of a company before you were at Google, obviously. President of a company is one of those roles that you kind of can be whatever you want it to be, is my understanding of it. How do you conceive of the role of President in Signal?

• 16:43Speaker 02

  Well, I have core lanes in that role. So, you know, and to back up for a second, I've been on the board for a number of years. I've worked with Moxie and kind of a community. There's a kind of an open source community of folks who think hard about technical privacy preservation. And I've been, you know, in and out of that community for, you know, almost a decade now. So I'm very familiar with the folks in this space. I'm familiar with the folks at Signal. And so this was almost like a gradual transition into this role of just like intensifying my attention to Signal until it's my, uh, my whole work life. In this role, I'm gonna be, you know, I'm gonna be focusing on the narrative aspects, like, how do we You know, how do we communicate what Signal is?

• 17:26Speaker 02

  Why it's so wonderful to people who might want to use it, right? And this is particularly in an environment where there is kind of increasing understanding of the harms of the surveillance business model, increasing understanding of the monopoly power of big tech, but not many actions people can do when they're like, I feel really uncomfortable with this, but what do we do, right? It, you know, kind of interpolates our entire life. So, you know, I think getting, getting the word out there that Signal is truly different and then building that network effect of encrypted communications. So anyone who picks up Signal can talk to anyone they want to on Signal without having to think about it, without having to be a privacy ideologue, right? It's not, you know, my friends aren't just cryptographers who live in Berlin.

• 18:11Speaker 02

  My friends are a number of people with varied interests. Some truly probably don't care about privacy, but nonetheless, they're cool people. I like to hang out with them, right? So I need to be able to reach them on that app. And, you know, if they're not there, Signal is significantly less useful to me. So, you know, I'm going to be working on, working on that narrative aspect. I'm also, you know, I mentioned policy awareness. So that is just, you know, thinking about the global landscape, the, you know, regulatory and legislative landscape and how that, how that affects Signal. How do we think about that during a product development process? How do we think about that in terms of, you know, our high-level strategy? And then I will also be working with the leadership team to direct strategy. So we're at, you know, as an organization,

• 18:55Speaker 02

  we grew from what I would characterize as a, you know, passion-driven hypothesis project. This was, you know, an open-source project on a shoestring. Big thanks to Marcy Marlin Spike, Tyler Reinhardt, a number of the sort of original folks at Signal who made a bunch of sacrifices and worked extremely hard to get this effort off the ground. In the last few years, Signal has matured and I would say is at an inflection point as an organization. You know, it's time to take the next step. We have, you know, over a hundred million downloads in the Play Store, but, you know, what does it look like when we, you know, reach the next stage and are serving, you know, hundreds of millions of people across the globe?

• 19:38Speaker 02

  And how do we build a Signal that can, can really meet this moment? And I think, you know, sustainability is definitely part of that. What is a business model? That I don't think has been done yet that can sustain technology like Signal outside of the surveillance paradigm.

• 19:55Nilay Patel?

  So you talked about narrative and reaching people and the network effect of everybody you know is using Signal. So you're not even thinking about it. You don't have to evangelize the service.

• 20:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 20:04Nilay Patel?

  Another way to characterize that is growth, right? Your job is to grow the product. And then the backend of it is what you just said, which is figure out how to monetize that product against that growth and run a product at that scale in a way that's sustainable. Is growth the imperative here?

• 20:17Speaker 02

  Like, I've consciously avoided some of those terms because they're so closely aligned with like profit motives. And I don't want to be misunderstood, right? Yes, of course we want to grow because our, you know, our mission is to provide truly private communication to anyone who wants it across the globe at any time, right? So, you know, we grow so that we can fulfill our mission, not so that we can just, you know, we're not looking at like growth hacking or adding like, you know, weird features, you know, to get an inflated boost. We're looking at, you know, how do we actually reach the people who do need to use this tech, reach the people who want a convenient messaging service and sort

• 20:59Speaker 02

  of, you know, ensure that they are able to use Signal quickly and easily, that they know about it, that, you know, when they open it up, all their friends are there, that it's a seamless and pleasant experience. So yes, you know, I think, I think you can put it in those terms. I have intentionally not put it in those terms because I want to, you know, not even echo the language of, you know, the alternatives which are doing something that is, you know, may look the same on the surface, but is, you know, substantively very, very different.

• 21:27Nilay Patel?

  I want to come back to that because I think there's a lot there to unpack and there's growth, regardless of the motive for the growth, comes with a pretty thick set of challenges. Once you get to that scale. So I do want to come back to that, but I have to ask you this sort of classic decoder question. How do you make decisions? You've been in a lot of different companies, a lot of different environments, a lot of different roles. You must have a pretty robust way of thinking about big decisions you have to make. How do you make decisions?

• 21:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, I don't have a flow chart for decisions, right? I don't have like, you know, my VC Twitter thread, like the three things I know about decision making.

• 22:00Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that's not, that's not, I hope that's not what I implied. I just meant like you've made a lot of decisions in your life, a lot of high stakes decisions.

• 22:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 22:07Nilay Patel?

  How do you think about it?

• 22:08Speaker 02

  I mean, I, you know, it is a combination of as much research as I need to do until I'm satisfied I have the ground truth around something. So, you know, I will ask very dumb questions until I am sure that like there isn't some like trick or some sort of, you know, issue that I haven't, you know, fully understood. That means, you know, I'll read academic papers or I'll call people who've worked in a certain sector, or I will reach out to a mentor who maybe doesn't know much about the space, but has a sense of dynamics and might, you know, lend a different eye, right? You know, it's, I basically have as big a toolbox as I can and I will pull from any tool that, you know, feels useful. And then, you know, I think it will be, you know, again, some combination of instinct,

• 22:53Speaker 02

  like when has this worked well in the past? When is it not, right? Like the benefit of having been in this industry for almost 20 years is you just like build up a big set of experience and there's a lot of like pitfalls you've fallen into before so you can avoid them. And then I think there's also sort of a, you know, it, it needs to be accompanied with humility. Like this is the decision we're making. Here is the basis for this decision, which I'm really committed to, you know, making sure everyone understands, you know, my basis, right? Like this is why this decision is made. You don't have to agree, but you can see the logic that led me to it, right? And then if it, you know, how do we measure that it's the right decision, right? What are the benchmarks we're looking at going forward? And how do I remain willing to say like, look, that was wrong?

• 23:35Speaker 02

  You know, let's, let's back up because like clearly it's not going the direction we wanted it to go. So, you know, let's, let's recalibrate. Let's look into our assumptions. Let's do it over. And I think, you know, there's kind of a, a combination of like iterating and learning on the go in, you know, while being sensitive to like, you know, what is, what is our, what are our ultimate goals? Why, you know, why is this decision being made? And I think bringing everything I have, you know, my experience, my knowledge and any research I need to do to bear on the decision.

• 24:06Nilay Patel?

  So let's put that into practice. There is a big decision for Signal coming up. You mentioned Brian Acton is currently the interim CEO. Moxie Marlin Spike, who is the, one of the co-founders, he was the CEO, he stepped down last January. You got to hire a new CEO. What are you looking for? How are you going to do it?

• 24:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I think we're looking for somebody with, you know, stellar product experience. We want somebody who can really focus in on the organization. So, you know, how do we get our development practices and coordination as cleanly calibrated and well-oiled as possible? How do we think about, you know, scaling this organization, growing this organization, growing our users, you know, ensuring that we are, you know, choosing the right features and, you know, innovations to function on, while understanding that this is not, you know, your average tech startup, right? That our growth is in service of something different, that our organization does have the luxury to say no to certain choices,

• 25:06Speaker 02

  to reject the move quick and break things paradigm if that's not going to serve our ultimate mission. So I think it's somebody with those, who has that experience, but who also has sensibilities that will enable them to sort of discern the differences between a Signal and between, you know, X, Y, Z, you know, kind of, I don't know, some social app that's a shim for data collection that goes into, you know, some DOD algorithm or something. You know, the truly, you know, the truly dark side of tech.

• 25:40Nilay Patel?

  I feel like you might have some history with not being happy with DOD-related projects.

• 25:44Speaker 02

  I will just say, the more you know about so-called AI, the more skeptical you become.

• 25:50Nilay Patel?

  Fair enough. Why is it not you? I mean, you're very passionate about Signal. It seems like you could do all those things. Why not just pick yourself?

• 25:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, one reason is I want to go deep on the areas that I have experience in and that I just love doing, right? And this was, you know, this was a role I talked to the board, you know, for a long time. And this was a role that we sort of shaped around some of my interests and around some of my, you know, it's not increasing realization, right? Like, I think I've always been a massive Signal booster. I used Signal when it was called Red Phone and Tech Secure like way back in the day, you know, before there was an iOS app. But I think, you know, as I had Have moved through my career and occupied, you know, different positions in, you know, academia, in tech, you know, very briefly at the Federal Trade Commission.

• 26:37Speaker 02

  It was just a realization that this is really something I thought a lot about and a place where I could very meaningfully put my time. And I, you know, it, it just was clearly the most meaningful thing I could do with my energy and expertise. And I think, you know, what we want from a CEO is also somebody who has, you know, on the ground product experience, which I have some of, but, you know, I have not been in the messaging space. I just think it would be, it would be great to work side by side with that person and to work on the leadership team. But it was, you know, this was a very intentional choice and it was sort of shaped around, you know, what I think I do best. And, you know, I, we want to shape the CEO role for somebody who, you know, fits those specific needs.

• 27:19Speaker 02

  And it's, you know, really inward focused, getting everything on rails. And this is not to say things aren't on rails now, but, you know, if you're preparing for growth, if you're preparing, you know, to meet this moment, to really recognize this inflection point and mature the organization. We need somebody who's able to focus inward on those issues.

• 27:37Nilay Patel?

  How's the search going? Do you have a timeline?

• 27:38Speaker 02

  We don't have a timeline, but it's, it's active.

• 27:40Nilay Patel?

  And then who, what does it look like at the end? Do you have a board meeting and you all sit down? You

• 27:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 27:45Nilay Patel?

  Throw secret ballots on the table? Do you raise your hand? What's the, most people are never going to pick a CEO. So give them a vision of what that process is like at the end.

• 27:53Speaker 02

  Cool. There are interviews. We want to make sure that this is, you know, somebody that leadership and the team feel, you know, just wildly enthusiastic about, right? Somebody who just, you know, lights up every interview and is, is sort of, you know, clearly showing their knowledge of Signal and their vision and their insight about the space. And then we get really excited about that person. We pop virtual champagne. And then we have, have a board meeting and the board votes. And then, you know, there's all sorts of, you know, the sort of background logistics, right? You would need to make sure somebody can transition out of another role. And if you're hiring a CEO, they probably have significant responsibilities. So you, you know, create an offboarding and onboarding timeline. You work with them on that. You

• 28:37Speaker 02

  meet, you make sure they have all of the documentation and information they need. You sort of think about, you know, the sort of classic timeline is like first hundred days for executives. But, you know, what is the, what is the timeline for impact? What is the initial vision? And, you know, at that stage, I see myself as like a, you know, as a champion and a supporter, right? Like, how do I back this person up? How do I make sure they are sort of elevated to do, you know, the best job they can and that they have, you know, all the resources and insight I have to give and all the resources and insight, you know, that the org can offer as well.

• 29:10Nilay Patel?

  We need to take a quick break, but when we come back, I'm going to talk to Meredith about growing Signal and what that means for the company.

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• 30:24Nilay Patel?

  We're back. So let's talk about growth. We've mentioned it by different names several times. I understand exactly why you don't want to use the word growth that implies a bunch of Silicon Valley tropes, but you want to add users to Signal. And so growth is a

• 30:40Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 30:41Nilay Patel?

  is fundamentally the thing you're talking about, user growth.

• 30:43Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 30:44Nilay Patel?

  Is the goal everyone on the planet?

• 30:45Speaker 02

  The goal is everyone who wants to, needs to, has a smartphone, right? Everyone on the planet, yes, that is, that is the goal. But it's also that just, that almost like abstracts it into the land of fantasy, right? Like, I don't even, you know, I don't, I don't have the latest numbers, but not everyone on the planet has access to internet, right? Not everyone on the planet has access to a smartphone that's running an operating system that can support Signal, right? So there's, you know, sort of planetary distinctions and inequities and contexts that, you know, mean that I feel like throwing that out would just be like a bombastic tech founder kind of goal and not actually anchored in reality. However, like everyone who wants to use Signal, we want them to be able to use it, right?

• 31:30Speaker 02

  And again, the, you know, the premise there is that Signal is more useful than, for the people who use Signal, the more people who use Signal, right? Like a messaging app that no one use, uses is useless, right? A, you know, hyper secure, privacy aware messaging app that only three people use is only useful and secure and private to three people, right? So we want, you know, we really want that network effect because that's, you know, that's what makes messaging work.

• 31:57Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I asked the question that way because there's what, somewhere between, it's a little under eight billion people on the planet. 1.7 billion of those people live in China, which has blocked Signal.

• 32:07Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 32:08Nilay Patel?

  One and a half billion of those people live in India, which the government does not like encryption. Just off the bat, are those markets that you want to go into? Are those fights you want to have? Are those compromises you would make? Or are those people just off the books for you?

• 32:22Speaker 02

  I mean, let's be clear, we are not in the business of compromising on privacy. And we're not in the business of, you know, handing people who want and need Signal a compromised version of Signal, which, you know, we're not, we're not gonna do. Right? But, you know, are there people in South and East Asia who want to be able to talk privately, safely, intimately, outside of the gaze of corporate state surveillance? Absolutely. Do we want them to have access to Signal? Absolutely, we do. Right? You know, do we want Signal to be available there? Yes. Can we kind of magically transform the geopolitical dynamics? No, we can't. But, you know, we will do what is in, within our power to make sure

• 33:06Speaker 02

  that Signal is available to as many people as possible, and we will do that without compromising our privacy promises.

• 33:13Nilay Patel?

  So the Chinese government has effectively blocked Signal. You don't have plans to go into China in some way?

• 33:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I don't know what going into China would mean, like, you know, a ticket to Beijing, handout, you know, QR codes, I don't know.

• 33:26Nilay Patel?

  I'm saying like-

• 33:27Speaker 02

  We're not doing that, but-

• 33:29Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, right, you're not, sure, you're not, you're not doing like Uber-style and guerrilla user acquisition in China. I mean, you're not talk, actively talking to the Chinese government about what it would mean for Signal to be active in the Chinese market?

• 33:40Speaker 02

  No, we, you know, full stop, we're not gonna compromise. And, you know, that would imply that we are sort of in a negotiating stance. And again, this, you know, this is sort of the magical thinking that comes up. And I've been in tech almost 20 years, so I've seen this sort of recur, right? And it's this, you know, desire, particularly by state actors, to kind of like break encryption for their purposes without understanding that that breaks it fundamentally across the board. So, you know, there's no, I don't know, this sounds like a little bit dated. You know, there's no compromising with math, I guess is what I'll say, right? Like, if encryption is broken, it is broken, and then Signal doesn't keep its privacy

• 34:23Speaker 02

  promises, and then there's no real point for us to exist as a nonprofit whose sole mission is to provide a, you know, safe, private, pleasant place for, you know, messaging and communication in a world where those are vanishingly few and far between. You know, it's Signal, and then there's, you know, there are a number of other services, but because very few people use them, they're very- You know, they're much, much, much, much, much less useful to most people who pick them up and try them.

• 34:52Nilay Patel?

  Right. So putting this out there, Apple's solution to this problem, because China is a gigantic market for Apple and its devices, is to say iMessage is encrypted, but to allow a state operated company to actually run the iCloud data centers in China, which seems like a, right, they have threaded the needle in a way that allows them to claim the thing they want to claim, even though the government holds encryption keys. You're not going to do that. You're not even like allowing for a solution like that to exist.

• 35:21Speaker 02

  Let the record show, hell, no, we're not going to do that. No. I mean, and this is again, like, let's pin, let's like flip this and talk about the business model. Apple is doing that because like every quarter, they have to report their growth and revenue stats to the board. And if those stats are like, you know, not looking to acquire a new but unacquired market, then eventually their executive team is going to get fired and new people brought in because the imperative of their company, to put this in machine learning terms, the objective function of their company is increasing profit and growth forever, like literally the definition of metastasis, right? That's not us, right? Like, we don't need to do that. We do not need to, you know, make those compromises.

• 36:04Speaker 02

  Like myself and our CEO will not get fired if we're not sort of bringing new market strategies, however, you know, twisted the compromise is to the board. We have a different mission and a different set of incentives. So, you know, which makes it easy to say, hell, no, to a question like that.

• 36:21Nilay Patel?

  So Signal is in India right now. India has claimed Signal's not in compliance with some regulations there that would require one of these magical thinking backdoors. Are you going to leave India? You're going to stay there? You're going to fight? How's that going to work?

• 36:32Speaker 02

  We are still available to people in India who want to use Signal, right? We are not going to compromise on privacy and that is our stance. And we'll, you know, we'll do everything we can to continue to be available to the people in India who want and need Signal.

• 36:49Nilay Patel?

  But if India passes a law or deems Signal to not be in compliance with whatever encryption regulation, you'll walk?

• 36:55Speaker 02

  I mean, if the choice is, you know, breaking Signal or walking. But again, you know, I think a lot of times these policy strategies and discussions just, you know, they're not, it's not like a Boolean, right? It's not a, you know, cut and dry engineering decision. These are very. Muddy and frankly not things that it's usually best to go into detail on publicly because you're having to think about a lot of different political, social, et cetera, dynamics all at once and make up to the minute choices based on dynamic situations. So that is a very broad answer, but again, I think we're going to be keeping our eye

• 37:40Speaker 02

  on it. We're going to, again, be doing everything we can to remain available to as many people as possible without breaking Signal.

• 37:47Nilay Patel?

  Well, it's a broad answer to a specific question, right? If a government in the world says, "In order to operate in our country, we want the keys to your encryption," would you just walk?

• 37:58Speaker 02

  Yes, we would walk. We will not hand over the keys to our encryption. We will not break the encryption. And in fact, the way we're built, we don't have access to those keys.

• 38:06Nilay Patel?

  So then there's the flip side of it, which is sort of internal to Signal and what value Signal has as a company and what things you can and can't do because you cannot see into the content, which I think is maybe the most difficult thing for any company to reckon with when they operate a service with lots and lots of users who might do lots and lots of things. In 2021, we watched a story from Casey Newton about that group chat feature you mentioned, where you can share links to group chats. Thousands of people can join them. Signal obviously cannot see what is going on inside of those group chats because it's encrypted. That means bad actors can do bad things inside of Signal and spread their messages inside of Signal. Is that something that concerns you?

• 38:49Speaker 02

  I think that that story from Casey Newton was not a totally clear picture of the real dynamics inside Signal. I think the place where we really think about these is in the product direction, right? When we're thinking through new features and capabilities, a number of very smart people who spend a lot of time thinking through the implications. You know, I think the, you know, the question of like, but what if bad actors did it is, you know, it's, it's compelling and it's often very emotionally charged, right? Like, these are, you know, the truth remains, however, that like, you can't provide a service that truly protects the privacy of good actors, you know, many of whom often have a lot less power than the people they're, you know,

• 39:35Speaker 02

  not wanting to be surveilled and tracked by, while sort of opening up that service to allow surveillance of bad actors. Like, there isn't, you know, there is no squaring that circle. And, you know, I think we are committed to providing a service that is, you know, again, truly private for both. And I can, you know, I can talk about, you know, when I was, when I was participating in labor organizing at Google, we used Signal. And we were, you know, I knew, because I'd been at the company for, you know, like, over a decade at that point, you know, that the company was, had teams that were looking for a pretext to, you know, fire me, right? And, and those pretexts exist. I was part of, you know, ethical whistleblowing networks, right?

• 40:18Speaker 02

  We were sort of sharing information we thought was in the public interest with the public and with journalists, which I, you know, I stand behind. There's, a lot of this information should not be behind the walls of proprietary tech companies, where the decisions are being made based on profit, not on social good. Full stop.

• 40:34Nilay Patel?

  Yes, I agree with you.

• 40:36Speaker 02

  There's, yeah, the least controversial statement.

• 40:39Nilay Patel?

  As, as someone who also participates in that dynamic, yes, I agree with you.

• 40:43Speaker 02

  Right. So, I was participating, along with many others, in networks of ethical whistleblowing, which would have provided that pretext, right? Like, easy, like, pick this person off. But we were using Signal, and we knew Signal was secure. And we were, you know, using Signal on our personal devices, so there was no, like, device manager that was able to key log. Very important detail for those of you taking notes. And that meant that I could feel safe being part of those activities. And I, you know, it's very, it's hard to describe in, like, clear, you know, kind of analytical, sterile, technical terms, what that meant. But it was, you know, it's the difference between that, like, stomach-dropping fear when you're like...

• 41:24Speaker 02

  Shit, did one of the most sophisticated technical adversaries just like, you know, blow up my spot, you know, which means that like, I'm unsafe, my health insurance is unsafe. I might, you know, implicate some of my friends who I'm, you know, also working with on this. You know, the difference between that and being able to sort of like clearly and securely sort of participate in those ethical activities. And again, you know, there is no, there is no, you know, splitting the baby on this question, right? Either it is secure and it's private for everyone, or it's not. And then there's a big question, like an existential question, like, why do this at all?

• 42:03Nilay Patel?

  Like I said, I agree with you, but there's idealism and then there's in practice. So there's an election coming up. If the Proud Boys post a Signal group chat link to recruit people to go storm the Capitol because they don't believe in the election results, what, what happens? Do you have a moderation team that takes it down? Do you just let it happen? How does that go?

• 42:24Speaker 02

  I think like, if we look back at like January 6th, that's actually like a pretty good example. That was planned in the open, right?

• 42:31Nilay Patel?

  Sure, but I'm, but I'm asking you specifically, if this happens on Signal, what happens?

• 42:35Speaker 02

  I mean, we would not know that, right? Like Signal is fully private and fully encrypted.

• 42:40Nilay Patel?

  But if, but the links are not private, right? You can just post the links.

• 42:44Speaker 02

  Well, the links can be posted in a forum, right? And the groups have a limit of a thousand people.

• 42:49Nilay Patel?

  So you, you can't even see that a thousand people clicked this link and started planning the thing?

• 42:53Speaker 02

  No, we can see that a link exists to a group we don't know about.

• 42:56Nilay Patel?

  And if the link isn't a Proud Boys forum, you would not take any action against it. If you're like, if it's like, click this link to help plan.

• 43:02Speaker 02

  So are you, are you asking, do we have people out there clicking every link that is, you know, and then like checking out, does the forum sort of comport with the ideological position that Signal agrees with? Cause we don't, we don't have that.

• 43:13Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I think in the most abstract way, I'm saying, do you have a content moderation team?

• 43:16Speaker 02

  No, we, I mean, we don't have con, we're not, you know, we're also not a social media platform, right? We don't amplify content. We don't, you know, we don't have sort of kind of telegram, I think they're called channels, right? Where they're sort of broadcast only to like, you know, thousands and thousands of people. We have been really careful in our product development side not to develop Signal as a social network that has sort of algorithmic amplification that allows that, you know, one, two millions, you know, amplification of content. We are a, you know, we are a messaging platform. So we don't, you know, we don't have a content moderation team. Because one, we are fully private. We don't see your content. We don't know who you're talking about. And two, because we're not, you know, we're not a content platform. It's a different paradigm.

• 44:00Nilay Patel?

  So Signal has a terms of service. There's stuff you're not allowed to do with it. How do you enforce that terms of service?

• 44:06Speaker 02

  You know, we don't have access to your messaging. We don't have access to who you're talking to. We have, you know, minimized our access to information about you, about your conversations, about your friends, about your networks. So, you know, we are not, we are not out there policing who you talk to, policing what you talk about. You know, that's anathema to the mission of Signal.

• 44:27Nilay Patel?

  So you've added Stories, which is the ephemeral messages people are probably familiar with. The reason that those are popular, especially for apps that is because they're sticky, right? It gets people to come back and use the app more. And you can measure it and you can say, we need to add more sticky features. Does Signal measure the stickiness of the app? Are you like measuring how people use it to add features that are sticky like that?

• 44:45Speaker 02

  No, we don't do analytics or tracking. So we actually don't have that information, which is, which means we have to use other pieces of information and intuition when we're making product choices. But, you know, we don't measure that. We have very, very limited information. Yep. You know, when people last used the app is it.

• 45:04Nilay Patel?

  So when, when you have product people and engineers deciding what features to add, they don't have the data to back up their arguments. They just have to say, this is a good idea?

• 45:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, we don't track or analyze use on, on specific features. So, you know, there are insights that are produced outside of Signal. There is sort of, you know, basic sensibilities that come from, you know, folks having experience and sort of, you know, oftentimes decades of experience in the messaging space. So it's not, you know, we're not riding blind. We're just not relying on surveilling our users to make our choices.

• 45:35Nilay Patel?

  That seems extremely refreshing. We need to take another break. When we come back, we're going to talk about Signal's revenue.

• 45:42Nilay Patel?

  Hi, I'm Neelai Patel, editor in chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. This week is part of our special series on the future of business. I talked with Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO of CloudFlare, about how AI bots and agents are remaking the business model of the web, and how CloudFlare is trying to build a new economy around websites getting paid. Every time an AI crawler shows up.

• 46:03Speaker 05

  We polled all of that data and looked at it and said that, you know, it would be the second half of 2027, automated traffic will become larger than human traffic. I was stunned when, just a few months later in May, team came to me and said, you won't believe it, but automated traffic is now past human traffic online. And that's just expanding like crazy. And if you, if you extrapolate that out, five years from now, we think that automated traffic will be a thousand times human traffic online.

• 46:28Nilay Patel?

  This was a fascinating conversation, not just about the future of the web, but also about how one of the world's most important software companies is deciding which of its employees it can replace with AI. Listen to Decoder wherever you get your podcasts.

• 46:41Speaker 03

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• 47:32Nilay Patel?

  We're back with Meredith Whitaker. Let's just talk about government regulators for a minute. Usually when regulators, particularly in this country lately, want to break encryption, they immediately turn to child abuse. It is maybe a new and somewhat startling trend that this is what regulators have focused on to break encryption. They pointed that gun at Apple really strongly. Apple developed a system that has not yet rolled it out to scan your devices in this way. They claim protects your privacy, so you can't use their devices for child abuse material. Is that something that Signal would do to say, we don't even, to protect everyone? We know that there has to be some on a child abuse material. That's just the unnerving reality of all services at scale.

• 48:16Nilay Patel?

  And Signal saying, we can't even see it. We can't take any action against it. Or is there something you would do to take action against it?

• 48:23Speaker 02

  I would point to the work of folks like Raina Peppercorn, Matt Blaze, Susan Landau, who've looked at sort of content scanning and what we might refer to as analog backdoors. The issue with Apple's proposal to scan everything on your device is that they still control what they're scanning for. And I would also point to a number of the sex worker organizers and people who are more on the margins, who are more fearful of being caught up in these scannings, often arbitrarily enforced. Very rarely are there ways to contest these decisions.

• 49:04Speaker 02

  And when you have a company like Apple, it's very unclear whether through some national security letter or another mechanism, the US government or another state could mandate scanning for just a little extra. Right? It is an extremely dangerous slippery slope that is right at the nexus of state corporate surveillance. These techniques, whatever you call them, need to be understood as backdoors into privacy and encryption. So no, Signal has absolutely no plans to scan anyone's messages, to decide which messages are okay or not. That is our general stance there.

• 49:43Nilay Patel?

  So we've actually had Peppercorn on the show to talk about the Apple system before.

• 49:47Speaker 02

  Fabulous. Hi, Raina.

• 49:49Nilay Patel?

  She's wonderful. Yeah, go listen to that episode, too. Finish listening to this one and then go listen to that one. But Apple's position there is, well, we think this is bad and we are getting this government pressure. We've built this complicated system. You know, Microsoft has built a complicated system to hash against this known imagery. There's other ways to do it. It is all very complicated. It comes with a set of trade offs. But the goal of those trade offs is to eliminate the bad things. Right? And you can say the trade offs are too costly, but the goal is potentially a good one, like probably a good one, right? Don't have this material on our service. You're saying the trade offs are far too costly. We're gonna just allow this material on the Signal service.

• 50:31Speaker 02

  I'm saying the trade offs aren't trade offs, right? There isn't like some, you know, kind of scale of justice that we are sort of, you know, like evening out, right? Like you either break it or you don't. Either Signal's core premise is intact or it's not. And that's just, you know, that's that. And I also, you know, there are arguments that I think there are better people positioned to make than I, but there are a lot of techniques for law enforcement that don't involve immediately turning to digital surveillance. Right? And there are a lot of, I think, I think we need to dig into a more troubling history of where is, you know, where are these bad things not prosecuted?

• 51:15Speaker 02

  Who doesn't get prosecuted for them? Right? Like where are there, you know, where are they allowed to exist in the analog world? Because there's an unwillingness or political pressure not to check them or a lack of focus on these. And, you know, really explore like what other mechanisms exist to, you know, check these dynamics that are not often using, you know, the most emotionally, emotionally stirring arguments, which really, you know, it is, I don't think any of us can sit here and like listen to, you know, stories about child abuse and not be moved unless we're, you know, sociopaths, right? Like, you know, this really matters and it is horrific, right? Full stop.

• 51:56Speaker 02

  But too often, I think that pretext gets used to sort of reflexively instill in people a response to these questions. It's like, break anything we have to break because this is like too emotionally meaningful for me to like sit by, right? Without, you know, it almost short circuits that sort of, you know, deliberate and, you know, discerning analysis of the, the whole scope of the problem. So I think that is also an issue with this debate.

• 52:23Nilay Patel?

  So we've talked about government pressure. We've talked about. The content moderation problem, those are problems that come with scale, right? As you get more and more scale, more and more governments are going to pressure you to break things. As you get more and more scale, you'll get more and more pressure from your users, from your employees, potentially to moderate in some way. Let's actually talk about how you would get that scale right now. In the United States, for example, almost everybody has a phone, right? There's a significant population, people who don't have access, but it is reasonably fair to say the people who can get phones have phones in the United States. You have to take market share away from competitors in order to grow, right? You have to, people have to start using Signal and stop using SMS. They have to stop using iMessage, they have to stop using WhatsApp. iMessage is pretty dominant, right?

• 53:08Nilay Patel?

  There, there is like a trope about blue bubbles and green bubbles that exists for a reason. iMessage users are not willing to switch away from those blue bubbles. How do you get them to switch?

• 53:18Speaker 02

  Well, first, just install Signal, right? Use it with the people who are using Signal. You know, in a sense, like, yes, of course, we want people to switch. But, you know, many people use many different, you know, services, you know, potentially overlapping services for many things, right? So I think, you know, I think we first need to make it clear that Signal is sort of different, right? You know, what we offer is, you know, true privacy, not, you know, privacy claims with little caveats, you know, in a 15-page term of service. And make it clear, like, this is, you know, extremely valuable as something that will, you know, protect you, allow for, you know, intimate, safe conversations with you and your friends.

• 54:02Speaker 02

  And I think, you know, we do see people sort of understanding that, you know, understanding those distinctions increasingly, you know, over the, the last five years. And then our task is to make Signal as pleasant and useful as possible, right? What are the features we can add that competitors might not be willing or able to? Because of our unique business model, because our incentives are different, you know, because, you know, privacy is forefront in our, in our product and in our mission. Then we just need to make sure, like, people know about it and people are able to quickly and easily use it, right? You should open Signal and again, you shouldn't have to really, you know, you can believe that it's important, you can know why you downloaded it.

• 54:45Speaker 02

  But the second you're using it to like, you know, share directions. You shouldn't be actively thinking about that. It should just work. There should be a seamless experience. You know, you get in there, you know, share your story. We have a new feature that is in beta right now. It's stories. They're very cute. I encourage people to use them when they're fully available. And, and, you know, it, it looks and feels and, you know, acts like a messaging app, which again is, you know, this is not easy, right? Like the, the norms and expectations about what messaging apps should do have been set by these big, you know, surveillance messaging apps, right? These, you know, big kind of corporate structures, right? And, and Signal, you know, just by way of comparison, this is a sort of stat I've thrown

• 55:29Speaker 02

  around in a, in a couple of places, but WhatsApp has over a thousand engineers. And that's just their engineering team. I think if you added sort of, you know, support and policy, et cetera, et cetera, you're looking at many thousands of people just, you know, sustaining WhatsApp. That's not meta. You have Telegram has, you know, somewhere around 500 employees. So that's, you know, fairly big. And Signal is 40 people, you know? It's 40 people maintaining an app across, you know, three clients. It's not, you know, it's not, it's, it's hard, thankless, constant work. And I'm, you know, I'm privileged to work with the brilliant people who do it, but nonetheless, they work really hard doing it. It's not any cheaper for us just because we don't participate in the surveillance business model, right? So it's tens of millions of dollars a year.

• 56:11Speaker 02

  And that's like hosting, transit, registration, you know, et cetera, et cetera. All of the costs of just, you know, making sure Signal is available everywhere, always seamlessly, which are the expectations that have been set, you know, by the current tech ecology. So I think, you know, we, we do need to, you know, continue developing and building Signal so it meets those expectations and figure out ways that a, that a service like ours can sustain, given, you know, given the forever cost and given the labor requirements.

• 56:42Nilay Patel?

  So, but that's the, the forever cost is what I'm getting at is it's hard enough to get people to not use iMessage. Like Google has now failed for a decade to get people to switch off of iMessage.

• 56:53Speaker 02

  They had like doing this Truly appalling strategy.

• 56:56Nilay Patel?

  Right. I mean, but like. It is in Google's best interest to develop a messaging app that works and they, Google's Google and they can't get out of their own way.

• 57:05Speaker 02

  They developed forty thousand that didn't work, so, you know.

• 57:08Nilay Patel?

  Sure, but they can't do it, right? Microsoft can't do it. Facebook can't do it. Facebook will happily tell you that more, there's more action on Instagram and messaging than there is on the grid or in stories, but they haven't displaced iMessage. You've got that problem. And then on top of it, you've got the, also, the users need to like us so much they donate to our foundation so we can keep the thing running.

• 57:30Speaker 02

  Not every user needs to donate, right? We need, you know, again, we're never gonna, we're never gonna charge to use Signal because, you know, privacy shouldn't be only for people who want to, you know, pay for it or can pay for it. But we do think that people will recognize, you know, I, I don't subscribe to the, to the theory that like people are idiots, right? I think people are very discerning and they get it when they hear it, right? And, you know, people get that the surveillance business model is no good, right? They get that we are, you know, some here, somewhere fairly scary with the power that has been, you know, sort of ceded to these large, you know, surveillance tech giants, right? And, you know, they understand that like alternatives are necessary. So, you know, it doesn't have

• 58:15Speaker 02

  to be everyone, but some percentage of the millions of people who use Signal donating five bucks a month, right? Like, that's what we're looking at. Like, a casual Patreon model that is again at scale so that we are, you know, we're able to support the significant, you know, maintenance costs for Signal and that, you know, frankly, is, is the hardest to kind of cut off at the knees, right? What we don't want is to have, you know, we, we are really, really fortunate that, you know, Brian Acton's generous, you know, long-term loan has allowed us this foundation to sort of experiment with sustainability models to like, you know, grow Signal to get it in shape. But I think, you know, we're really aiming for small donors,

• 59:00Speaker 02

  both because we think people will be willing to donate and because we want a model that, you know, where where one person pulling out wouldn't capsize the ship.

• 59:09Nilay Patel?

  Is that the model you have or is that the model you want? Because it's it seems like it's the model you want, but right now you've got Brian's money and a bunch of other big donors.

• 59:17Speaker 02

  We have like a hybrid, right? It's, you know, we have only started experimenting with the donation model. So, you know, it was buried like for a while. There was like a donate page buried on our website that, you know, people probably rarely found. And now we are sort of, you know, experimenting with just in-app nudges that are like, hey, if you want to kick down, kick down. Um, we have badges, which are like cute little signifiers that go on your profile image that just, you know, demonstrate that you donated. People can click on your badge. They can sort of click through to make their own donation. Um, but this is very recent. This is like, you know, in the last year or so. And I think we are again sort of iterating and experimenting with that model. And, you know, everyone listening, you know,

• 1:00:01Speaker 02

  download Signal if you haven't, make a little monthly donation. You know, it's it's easy and I can use some like boring nonprofit trope. It's like a cup of coffee or whatever, but like, you know, really, this is existentially important for like a livable future. We have to have a private way to communicate. And, you know, folks, particularly folks who are in and around tech, I think will understand that at a visceral level. And, you know, come on, join the community, kick in.

• 1:00:27Nilay Patel?

  Are you, is it going to be like Wikipedia? Are you going to ask us for money every three months?

• 1:00:30Speaker 02

  Well, no, we are, we're gonna have a lot of chill. And, um, we, you know, we want to remind people that we need money, but we also, you know, like the app is a messaging app, right? Like what we're dedicated to first and foremost is you open it. It's useful, it is pleasant, it's not in your face. So, you know, we want to be. We want to remind you, but we want to be really subtle about it. And that is actually something we have a lot of discussions about. Like, what is the minimum viable sort of notice to folks that we can get away with and still ensure that people, people who can donate know and, and can sign up easily?

• 1:01:08Nilay Patel?

  Last year, we reported that, I think it was Moxie's assessment that for Signal to be self-sustaining, it would need 100 million users. Is that still the number in your mind? Or how close are you to that goal?

• 1:01:18Speaker 02

  You know, number of users is, like, that's a shorthand assessment from Moxie, right? It's number, you know, percentage of 100 million users who also donate, right? Like, more users is more hosting, more transit, more registration costs, which is actually sort of, you know, a cost without folks donating. But yeah, I, you know, I think it's tens of millions of dollars a year. So we need enough users donating as a percentage of any user base so that we are, you know, we are able to, you know, cover those costs.

• 1:01:52Nilay Patel?

  Are you at 100 million users? How close are you to it?

• 1:01:55Speaker 02

  We are not at, we, we don't share user data publicly. We, we are not at 100 million users, I guess, is the, the straight answer to that question. But our user base is growing. And you can see, you know, we have over 100 million downloads in the Play Store. You know, we have a significant user base, which is, which is increasing. And I think, you know, I definitely think we will get there.

• 1:02:17Nilay Patel?

  So you recently announced that you're dropping SMS support from the Signal app. Google's pushing RCS really hard. Converting people into messaging apps is really hard. Getting people to not use iMessage is really hard. Why drop SMS?

• 1:02:31Speaker 02

  This is one of those decisions that has been a long time coming, has been agonized over, you know, by the leadership team, you know, before and after I joined, you know, surfaced at the board level. So this was not an easy decision. And for kind of a little bit of color on this, Signal is dropping SMS support for Android. So on Android, not iPhone, Android allowed people to set Signal as their default messaging app. So that meant they could send Signal messages, which are, you know, fully encrypted, fully private and secure. Or they could also answer insecure SMS text messages. So the SMS text messages were kind of like a guest in their text messaging house and were answered through Signal, you know, alongside Signal messages.

• 1:03:14Speaker 02

  This has been a feature that has been in the Android client for, you know, almost a decade at this point, and in that decade, a lot has changed. You know, SMS has always been insecure, but you know, SMS basically gives your messages in plain text to your telecom provider. So that is the opposite of Signal's stance and Signal's mission. And, you know, frankly, it was, we got a lot of reports that this was confusing to people. People didn't realize the difference between SMS and a Signal message. And, you know, we take that seriously because that can be, you know, that can be existentially dangerous for some people who are using Signal in some high-risk situations. There was also the issue, and this is not something that would have hit users in the

• 1:03:58Speaker 02

  US or in sort of, you know, historically rich countries, but in a number of disinvested regions, we were having people who would confuse an SMS message for a Signal message, send a bunch of SMS texts, and because SMS messages are billed at a very high rate, would get a huge bill when they were thinking they were using their data to use Signal. So, you know, those are a couple of the key reasons. I think the security was really the biggest reason. But there's also, you know, times have changed since 10 years ago. So as you said, Google is pushing RCS, and RCS is, you know, they hope, and, and, you know, it appears it's set to replace SMS at some point. And that was leading to more and more errors with the SMS integration.

• 1:04:42Speaker 02

  So, you know, you would not receive a message if your phone defaulted to RCS or something like that. And that meant, you know, that was increasingly hard for us to deal with on the user reports side. That meant that it was increasingly difficult to sort of, you know... Support SMS as a degrading standard. And it was, you know, it was something where, you know, there still isn't an official API for RCS, you know, for Signal to implement it, even if we were considering it, which was not, you know, that's not on our roadmap at this point. So, you know, those are the considerations that went into making this choice. Again, like I am a lifelong, or well, the life of Signal long Android Signal user who's used as my default the whole,

• 1:05:25Speaker 02

  whole time. So this is, you know, like this is the front of my pain points. But weighing the kind of security, the confusion and the fact that SMS is a deprecating standard were, you know, were things that weighted in the direction of removing it and sort of moving on to a future where Signal is fully secure and there's no ambiguity.

• 1:05:42Nilay Patel?

  Let me push you this a little bit.

• 1:05:45Nilay Patel?

  Obviously, Apple has played this game for a long time. iMessages, depending on your iMessage settings, are encrypted end to end. They're blue. They're more feature rich. SMS is green. Everyone understands that green is worse than blue in iPhone world. Why can't you just do a solution like that? Because what you're losing is the opportunity to convert SMS users into Signal users by saying, just use this one app for everything. And by the way, if your messages turn blue, you're in Signal, you're encrypted, you get all these other features.

• 1:06:17Speaker 02

  Let's be clear. Apple has advantages we don't there. You know, they control the hardware. They are the gatekeeper for the, you know, iOS and the iPhone. And they have a lot of levers they can pull that we can't, right? You know, they also don't support RCS, right? And we're talking about the Android ecosystem here, but right now there are two competing, you know, protocols. There's SMS and there is RCS. And, you know, it is difficult to implement a third-party SMS app when, you know, the phone will default to RCS, right? So there are a lot of other issues that we face as, you know, we are not a big tech company that controls the hardware that has that sort of closed ecosystem

• 1:06:58Speaker 02

  at our disposal so that we can sort of reliably make those choices for users. But yeah, you know, we did a lot of work trying to disambiguate. SMS between Signal messages and you know, this is no fault of the people who use Signal. This is simply like when people pick up tech, it's not so that they can be taught small nuances. Right. It's so they can quickly communicate with their friends. And so getting someone to sort of clock the difference in like a protocol layer, security property. That's a, you know, that's an education task that is pretty steep. It is very difficult to accomplish and it's particularly difficult to accomplish if unlike Apple, you don't, you know, control every, you know, part of the ecosystem you're operating in.

• 1:07:37Nilay Patel?

  You said RCS isn't on the roadmap. You said Google doesn't have an API for RCS Android. If Google had an API for RCS in Android, would RCS support go back on the roadmap for Signal on Android?

• 1:07:49Speaker 02

  You know, I haven't looked deeply enough at that to have a clear answer. I think that the answer is TBD, right? Like our goal is for Signal to offer unequivocal, casual, you know, just completely reliable security and privacy. So we would want to make sure RCS wasn't an issue vis a vis those goals. I know, you know, RCS is certainly much better than SMS, but I haven't, I have not pored over the spec because again, you know, our primary motivation in this was get rid of this, you know, confusing and inherently insecure option. Yeah.

• 1:08:22Nilay Patel?

  One of the criticisms that I read after the announcement came out was, hey, I was able to put Signal on my mom's phone and she didn't have to know anything, but I knew that I was now sending her Signal messages. This is how you grow the network. Now I need to have two apps. They need to have two apps. This is actually worse for Signal adoption because you're not sort of seamlessly onboarding people onto the encrypted network away from SMS. Are you worried about that or do you think this is just straight up? We got to market and make the thing better.

• 1:08:49Speaker 02

  This is why this was a hard decision, right? Like those folks are not wrong. That's real, right? Like I'm one of them, right? My dad uses Signal. He doesn't really know he uses Signal, right? He just uses the, you know, the app where the messages come in. You know, it will, this will probably be very confusing. And yeah, we, I think what we did is make a hard, kind of crappy choice. We were presented with two options we didn't like, and we chose the one that, you know, privileged privacy and security and a kind of a long-term roadmap. Where again, you know, SMS is being deprecated, people were confused, it was causing an increasing amount of errors. And, you know, the development effort of maintaining that in addition to doing all the other things was, you know, non-trivial. So, yeah, you know, those, those folks are right.

• 1:09:31Speaker 02

  You know, when we weighed all of the variables, this is what we came out with. I do think people will continue to use Signal. Of course, people will continue to adopt it, but, you know, it does make me really, you know, I'm not happy about, you know, as I put on Twitter, like pulling up on on-ramp to adoption, right? I'm not happy that it's going to be harder for me to like, explain this to my dad and my brother and, you know, other folks, but, you know, we don't, we don't create the reality that we're kind of operating in, and we had to face that.

• 1:09:59Nilay Patel?

  One of the promises of RCS is that it will be encrypted. I'm not sure how well carriers around the world are going to keep that promise, or Google will keep that promise, but that is one of the promises. Do you think that RCS represents competition for Signal?

• 1:10:11Speaker 02

  Uh, not at the moment, no.

• 1:10:12Nilay Patel?

  Why is that?

• 1:10:13Speaker 02

  Well, again, I haven't pored over the RCS specs, so I want to be really careful with like, you know, any flip answers and, you know, I could do that and come back on and we could have a whole conversation about it. Signal is not just encrypted, right? Like WhatsApp uses the Signal protocol to encrypt its messages. Signal doesn't just encrypt the message content, right? It is encrypting metadata, it is, you know, it did, you know, something which I consider like fairly revolutionary with its, you know, its new groups, methods and infrastructure, which was figure out a way to prevent Signal from knowing who is in a group and who's talking to whom, right? Like, these things are, you know, huge, you know, true, like, kind of scientific innovations

• 1:10:55Speaker 02

  that are also innovations in privacy that is sort of Signal trying as hard as we can to collect as little information about you, about who you talk to, as little meaningful information about, you know, what people are saying, who they're saying to it, who's using our server, uh, our service, et cetera. So, you know, I would need to Look at like the entire kind of end to end infrastructure, what incidental or metadata is being collected. And then I think we have to consider the concept of privacy structurally, not just technologically. Right? Like, people use encryption for a number of things. Uh, they still could collect data, right? Like, you know, if we're looking at an app that is controlled by Google, it is pretty trivial to join that metadata with a lot of the other,

• 1:11:37Speaker 02

  you know, wildly intimate and personal data that Google has and sort of make conclusions about people. Right? So, you know, we need to also look at the organizational and structural differences, but between a Signal and a Google. And, you know, Google Signal doesn't have any of that data. We don't buy data from data brokers. We don't, you know, scrape data from anywhere. We don't have it. We don't want it. We actually go out of our way, as I just described, to avoid having it or touching it or knowing it. Right? So I think that, you know, I think that we're talking about a difference in kind, and that difference in kind is not just vis a vis our technological implementation or, you know, whether we're using this variety of end to end encryption. Although, you know, the people who are using the state of the art messaging encryption system are using the Signal protocol. I think what we're talking about also is what are incentives?

• 1:12:21Speaker 02

  And how are we structured to ensure that we, you know, live by our mission and not, you know, in the name of profit and growth?

• 1:12:28Nilay Patel?

  Well, Meredith, it's been really great having you on Decoder. Thank you for all this time. What's next for Signal? What should people be looking for?

• 1:12:32Speaker 02

  Well, you should definitely check out for, you know, look out for the Stories update. That's in a, you know, a couple of weeks. We should be rolling out Stories, which are, you know, cute little ephemeral messages that you may be familiar with from other services. But on Signal, they will be, you know, fully private and secure. And that, you know, that's the next big feature launch. And we're all using it inside Signal. We all love it. And it's going to be great when we can actually use it with, you know, all of our friends and, and colleagues on Signal.

• 1:13:01Nilay Patel?

  Great. Thank you, Sachin and Decoder.

• 1:13:02Speaker 02

  Great. Thank you.

• 1:13:06Nilay Patel?

  Thanks again to Meredith Whittaker for being on Decoder today, and thank you for listening. I hope you enjoyed it. As always, I'd love to hear what you think of Decoder. You can email us at [email protected], or you can hit me up directly. I'm at Reckless on Twitter. If you like the show, please share it with your friends and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. If you really like Decoder, give us that five-star review. And as many of you have noticed, if you tweet at me about Decoder, I will almost certainly retweet you. Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Today's episode is produced by Creighton D. Simone and Jackie McDermott, was researched by Liz Leann, and edited by Callie Wright. The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Our senior audio director is Andrew Moreno. Our editorial director is Brooke Minter, and our executive producer is Eleanor Donovan. We'll see you next time.

• 1:13:49Nilay Patel?

  Hi, I'm Neelai Patel, editor in chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. This week, as part of our special series on the future of business, I talked with Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare, about how AI bots and agents are remaking the business model of the web, and how Cloudflare is trying to build a new economy around websites getting paid every time an AI crawler shows up.

• 1:14:10Speaker 05

  We polled all of that data and looked at it and said that, you know, it would be the second half of 2027, automated traffic will become larger than human traffic. I was stunned when, just a few months later in May, a team came to me and said, "You won't believe it, but automated traffic is now past human traffic online." And that's just expanding like crazy. And if you extrapolate that out, five years from now, we think that automated traffic will be 1,000 times human traffic online.

• 1:14:34Nilay Patel?

  This was a fascinating conversation, not just about the future of the web, but also about how one of the world's most important software companies is deciding which of its employees it can replace with AI. Listen to Decoder wherever you get your podcasts. This series is presented by EY.

• 1:14:51Speaker 06

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