What privacy price? End-to-end encrypted (E2EE) messaging app Signal issued a interesting overview of the costs required to develop and maintain privacy protection systems that protect user data from tracking by default.
The suspension, written by Signal president Meredith Whittaker and developer Joshua Lund, reveals that it currently spends about $14 million a year on infrastructure to run the private messaging service. and an additional $19 million a year for staff costs — totaling about $33 million to keep the lights on and the “many millions” of user messages safe from prying eyes.
It also predicts that the cost of running its service will rise to about $50 million by 2025.
The post does not show data about the active users of the service. But it’s likely to be in the tens of millions. (ONE Business of AppsThe estimate suggested that Signal had about 40 million monthly active users in 2021. while App Annie data we reported earlier that year showed it had about 20 million users at the end of 2020 — before the surge in usage caused by an exodus of WhatsApp users who were concerned about changes to the messaging app’s privacy belonging to the Meta policy.)
According to the post, just 50 full-time people keep the messaging service running while conducting research to continue pushing the envelope on privacy and — in Whittaker’s case at least — having something resembling a full-time job. employment and public policy advocacy herself which has seen her travel around the world in recent months to defend privacy rights and try to fend off government intrusions targeting E2EE.
The post conveys a clear message: Going up against the tech industry by keeping users safe from surveillance is a costly—but vital—business.
Signal is a non-profit, so it’s not a money-making business. But of course he still needs to have enough funds to cover the costs. And, clearly, costs increase as usage increases. Which means it needs to be proactive in finding ways to grow revenue that don’t compromise its fundamentally pro-user stance.
As detailed in the blog post, Signal goes much further in ensuring user privacy than even mainstream messaging apps that have implemented the E2EE protocol (such as Meta-owned WhatsApp). “To take one example, profile pictures and profile names are always end-to-end encrypted on Signal,” he writes. “This means that Signal does not have access to your profile name or your selected profile picture. This approach is unique in the industry. Actually, it was more than six years since we first announced this additional layer of protection, and to our knowledge none of our competitors have adopted it yet.
“Other messengers can easily see your profile picture, profile name and other sensitive information that Signal cannot access. Our choice here reflects our strong commitment to privacy, but it also means that it took more effort from Signal to support profile photos. Rather than a weekend project for a single engineer, our teams had to develop new approaches and concepts within the codebase (such as profile keys), which they worked to deploy across multiple platforms after an extensive testing period.”
Revealing how much it (already) spends annually on essentials like storage ($1.3 million), servers ($2.9 million), registration fees ($6 million), bandwidth ($2.8 million), other infrastructure needs such as disaster recovery ($700,000), as well as the aforementioned $19 million for staff (which covers salaries, taxes, and related HR costs), it appears that they intend to (gently) shake up the public — and hopefully convince a few more users to get into their wallet to chip in and help secure gold- typical private message option.
“To put it bluntly, as a nonprofit we don’t have investors or for-profit board members knocking on hard times, urging us to ‘sacrifice a little privacy’ in the name of meeting growth and monetary goals. This is important in an industry where ‘free’ consumer technology is almost always covered by the monetization of surveillance and invasion of privacy,” he warns.
“Instead of making money from surveillance, we are supported by donations, including a generous seed loan from Brian Acton. Our goal is to get as close to full small donor support as possible, relying on a large number of modest contributions from people who care about Signal. We believe this is the safest form of funding in terms of sustainability: Ensuring we remain accountable to the people who use Signal, avoiding any point of funding failure and rejecting the widespread practice of monetization oversight.”
As the post also points out, even alternative tech tools like Signal have to pay into the coffers of industry giants that own and manage key application infrastructures like cloud computing, and are usually in the data capture and surveillance business.
