Say "hello" to a different messaging experience. An unexpected focus on privacy, combined with all of the features you expect.
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Long before we knew that it would be called Signal, we knew what we wanted it to be. Instead of teaching the rest of the world cryptography, we wanted to see if we could develop cryptography that worked for the rest of the world. At the time, the industry consensus was largely that encryption and...
Signal still knows nothing about you, but inexplicably the government continues to ask.
Companies like Facebook aren’t building technology for you, they’re building technology for your data. They collect everything they can from FB, Instagram, and WhatsApp in order to sell visibility into people and their lives. This isn’t exactly a secret, but the full picture is hazy to most – dim...
Just over a week ago, we announced that Iranian censors had started blocking all Signal traffic in the country. As an interim solution to help people in Iran get connected again, we’ve added support in Signal for a simple TLS proxy that is easy to set up, can be used to bypass the network block, ...
Signal is the world’s most widely used truly private messaging app, and our cryptographic technologies provide extra layers of privacy beyond the Signal app itself. Since launching in 2013, the Signal Protocol—our end-to-end encryption technology—has become the de facto standard for private commu...
Yesterday, the BBC ran a story with the factually untrue headline, “Cellebrite claimed to have cracked chat app’s encryption.” This is false. Not only can Cellebrite not break Signal encryption, but Cellebrite never even claimed to be able to. Since we weren’t actually given the opportunity to co...
It’s the first half of 2021 – nearly five years since the “first half of 2016” – but in many ways not much has changed. The United Kingdom is still trying to figure out Brexit, another Justin Bieber song hit #1 on the charts (is it too late now to say sorry?), and Signal still doesn’t really know...
If your favorite way to update your friends about life disappears in 24 hours, we’ve got some happy news for you. Stories are now available on Signal for Android and iOS, with Desktop coming soon!
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 che...
As the world stands today, the future of transaction privacy does not look great. The existing landscape is dominated by traditional credit companies, who over the past decade have been steadily pushing their networks for increased access to user data. They (and their data customers) are on a tra...
Like many others, we have been following the latest developments in Australia related to the “Assistance and Access” bill with a growing sense of frustration. The widespread adoption of strong cryptography and end-to-end encryption has given people around the world the ability to protect their pe...
At Open Whisper Systems, we’ve been developing open source “consumer-facing” software for the past four years. We want to share some of the things we’ve learned while doing it. As a software developer, I envy writers, musicians, and filmmakers. Unlike software, when they create something, it is...
When legally forced to provide information to government or law enforcement agencies, we'll disclose the transcripts of that communication here.
In the “first half of 2016” (the most specific we’re permitted to be), we received a subpoena from the Eastern District of Virginia. The subpoena required us to provide information about two Signal users for a federal grand jury investigation. We’ve designed the Signal service to minimize the dat...