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Meredith Whittaker reaffirms that Signal would leave UK if forced by privacy bill | TechCrunch

Posted on September 22, 2023 by knjohn | Leave a comment

Onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2023, Meredith Whittaker, the president of the Signal Foundation, which maintains the nonprofit Signal messaging app, reaffirmed that Signal would leave the U.K. if the country’s recently passed Online Safety Bill forced Signal to build “backdoors” into its end-to-end encryption.

“We would leave the U.K. or any jurisdiction if it came down to the choice between backdooring our encryption and betraying the people who count on us for privacy, or leaving,” Whittaker said. “And that’s never not true.”

The Online Safety Bill, which was passed into law in September, includes a clause — clause 122 — that, depending on how it’s interpreted, could allow the U.K.’s communications regulator, Ofcom, to break the encryption of apps and services under the guise of making sure illegal material such as child sexual exploitation and abuse content is removed.

Signal’s pin feature shows why putting privacy first is hard | Fast Company

Posted on July 30, 2020 by knjohn | Leave a comment

Signal has become the privacy-focused consumer’s go-to messaging app. But a recent change to its back-end systems that was designed to make the app more accessible and competitive with other encrypted messaging services could be putting user data at risk.

At the core of Signal’s appeal is a level of digital protection and commercial disinterest in its users’ communications rarely seen by messaging service providers. Signal is now used broadly not just by hackers and professional paranoids, but activists, journalists, politicians, and any number of people who believe that their text messages and phone calls should be as private as an in-person conversation. Few other apps offer a similar level of security and privacy.