In the midst of world-wide protests against racism and police brutality, a lot of people are becoming more immediately aware and concerned about the security of their data and online communication. We’ve gotten a lot of questions at Signal over the past week, so we wanted to briefly recap how it is that we’ve designed Signal, and how we think about concepts like privacy, security, and trust. Read
Over the past several weeks, Signal traffic has gone through the roof. New users are signing up at unprecedented rates, and we’ve expanded our server capacity faster than we ever anticipated. It means a lot to us that so many people are relying on Signal during this difficult time. When users check in on their families, share moments of solace, smile with their friends, or discuss sensitive health
Signal’s mission and sole focus is private communication. For years, Signal has kept your messages private, your profile information (like your name and profile photo) private, your contacts private, and your groups private – among much else. Now we’re taking that one step further, by making your phone number on Signal more private. Here’s how: Read more...
Cellebrite makes software to automate physically extracting and indexing data from mobile devices. They exist within the grey – where enterprise branding joins together with the larcenous to be called “digital intelligence.” Their customer list has included authoritarian regimes in Belarus, Russia, Venezuela, and China; death squads in Bangladesh; military juntas in Myanmar; and those seeking to a
It’s been about two weeks since we announced an initiative to distribute versatile face coverings to help support everyone who is self-organizing for change in the streets. Since then, we’ve shipped over $25,000 worth of face coverings to organizers throughout the United States. Over $6,000 worth of merchandise was sent to Washington D.C. last week in time for the Juneteenth events in the heart of
Today we’ve started rolling out Signal for Android, which unites simple private messaging and simple private calling into a single app on Android. This is the culmination of our effort to combine TextSecure and RedPhone into one app, which we began on iPhone and are now bringing to completion on Android. Read more...
You should be able to communicate without worrying that every gossip tidbit, meme, or joke you share and who you share it with will get churned up into fodder for targeted ads or used to train an AI model. You also shouldn’t have to strip your communications down to the barest and most utilitarian version of relaying information. This is why Signal is dedicated to providing a truly private messagi
One immediate thing seems clear about 2020: it’s a good year to cover your face. Online, we’re working to scale and improve Signal for everyone that is relying on it, but as one small offline way to help support everyone self-organizing for change in the streets, we’re also distributing face coverings free of charge. Read more...
Last week, we received the following email from Amazon: From: [redacted], [redacted] Subject: Notification of potential account suspension regarding AWS Service Terms Moxie, Yesterday AWS became aware of your GitHub and Hacker News/ycombinator posts describing how Signal plans to make its traffic look like traffic from another site, (popularly known as “domain fronting”) by using a domain owned by
In the past, if you broke or lost your phone, your Signal message history was gone. This has been a challenge for people whose most important conversations happen on Signal. Think family photos, sweet messages, important documents, or anything else you don’t want to lose forever. This explains why the most common feature request has been backups; a way for people to get Signal messages back even i
Today we’re releasing Signal 2.0, with support for TextSecure private messaging. It is now possible to send end-to-end encrypted group, text, picture, and video messages between Signal on iPhone and TextSecure on Android, all without SMS and MMS fees. Signal 2.0 blends private phone calls and private messaging into a single frictionless interface, allowing you to focus on what’s important by quick
In addition to the end-to-end encryption that protects every Signal message, the Signal service is designed to minimize the data that is retained about Signal users. By design, it does not store a record of your contacts, social graph, conversation list, location, user avatar, user profile name, group memberships, group titles, or group avatars. We have been exploring techniques to further reduce
It’s 2015, and the end of the road for encrypted SMS/MMS in TextSecure. The TextSecure story started back in 2009, at the dawn of the smartphone era. Back then, TextSecure focused on securing the transport that everyone coming from feature phones was familiar with: SMS. Today, many things have changed, and TextSecure now emphasizes the “TextSecure transport,” which uses data rather than SMS. While
We recently received a great bug report from Jean-Philippe Aumasson and Markus Vervier, who identified a problem with the way that image, audio, and video attachments are processed by the Signal for Android code. We consider the implications of the bug to be low risk to Signal users, but have released an update for the Signal Android app that addresses the problems they reported. Read more...
Now that voice and video calls are available for everyone on Signal Desktop and iPad, in addition to our mobile clients, we want to share a closer look at the technology that makes it possible for incoming calls to ring across multiple devices. Every call placed on Signal has always been private and end-to-end encrypted, but we previously supported only calls to or from one primary device per pers
Signal 3.0 is now available in the App Store: iPad support has arrived. Set up your favorite tablet as a linked device. Forward messages between threads. Editing support lets you amend, extend, append, explain what you intend, or tie up loose ends before you hit send. Built-in support for video trimming can help any clip turn into a highlight. Tap on someone’s avatar in a group conversation to qui
The latest Signal release for iPhone, Android, and Desktop now includes support for disappearing messages. The timer has come With this update, any conversation can be configured to delete sent and received messages after a specified interval. The configuration applies to all parties of a conversation, and the clock starts ticking for each recipient once they’ve read their copy of the message. Rea
Your most frequently asked questions, dinner reservations, and vacation itineraries are already top of mind. Now they can be top of chat as well. In the latest version of Signal rolling out now, you can pin your most important messages to the top of your 1-1 and group chats. Read more...
When you’re standing next to a friend who says something funny, you can just laugh. You don’t need to pause and say “I found what you just said humorous” or quote their own words back to them before displaying a real-world emoji on your face. This feeling of immediacy and effortless response is what reactions are all about. They’re a quick way to share your take on any message, and you can try the
Winter Break Of Code Day Seventeen In this life nearly every relationship we create and maintain is built upon expectations. You do this, I’ll do that, and together we’ll fail to oppose entropy but stand a chance at plotting and navigating a loose course through it. These expectations extend beyond the individual, past the family, and onto society. Read more...
Several countries have recently blocked Signal, leaving their residents without a trusted and safe place to communicate. To help in this situation, Signal provides a built-in censorship circumvention feature and also includes support for a simple TLS proxy that can bypass these blocks in many circumstances and let people communicate privately. Read more...
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