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Privacy is Priceless, but Signal is Expensive (signal.org)

submitted 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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We estimate that by 2025, Signal will require approximately $50 million dollars a year to operate—and this is very lean compared to other popular messaging apps that don’t respect your privacy.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 11 months ago

If you're using it for personal correspondence with people you know and trust, that's probably fine. However, a secure and private communications platform should support more extreme use cases as well.

If you're a journalist, for example, you might need to communicate with people you do not know or trust. You could realistically be talking to someone who wants to kill you, or who is being monitored by people who want to kill you, particularly if you are covering high-profile political issues or working with whistleblowers (or are yourself a whistleblower). Even revealing information as broad as what city you're in (which would be revealed by your IP address) could be a risk to your physical safety.

Even though I do not personally face such high-level threats in my life, I feel better using services that allow for the possibility. Privacy is a habit, and who knows what tomorrow might bring?