This was in response to an increase in federal efforts to track down and monitor protestors.Īll of these great features started to slowly grow Signal’s image as the app to use for people who value their privacy, much in the same way anyone who values their privacy uses DuckDuckGo. For example, in June, Signal introduced a tool that allowed users to blur faces in the photos they send. Signal’s increased privacy efforts to help the protestors out only grew their brand image. During June’s first week, the app was downloaded over 5x more than it had been before. The app also says that there are no ads, and so there is no need to track your location or your whereabouts.Īll of these built-in privacy features made it the messenger of choice during the George Floyd Black Lives Matter protests. If you look at what the company offers, you see that they boast a “State-of-the-art end-to-end encryption” in all of your text messages and phone calls. Acton decided to take on an executive chairman role for the Foundation, while Marlinspike would act as the CEO of Signal Messenger.

As a consequence, Signal has sometimes suffered from our lack of resources or capacity in the short term, but we’ve always felt those values would lead to the best possible experience in the long term. Signal has never taken VC funding or sought investment, because we felt that putting profit first would be incompatible with building a sustainable project that put users first. Marlinspike stated that Signal hadn’t, and gave no inclination, that it would ever take money from the world of venture capital. The Foundation started with initial funding of $50,000,000, all from Acton’s personal bank account.

Acton was the co-founder of WhatsApp and had decided to leave WhatsApp and Facebook in 2017, the year prior to starting Signal. Marlinspike attributes most of the credit to Acton, saying that the whole foundation was “created and made possible” by him. It’s in their mission statement: Their goal is to “support, accelerate, and broaden Signal’s mission of making private communication accessible and ubiquitous.”īasically, that means that’s their mission is to help their mission of making communication more private and accessible. In early 2018, Brian Acton and Moxie Marlinspike formed the Signal Foundation, which was a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, dedicated to making private communication mainstream.

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