Its early products, TextSecure and RedPhone, became the unified product known as Signal in 2015.

Marlinspike bailed in 2013 to form a new secure-messaging-and-calling outfit called Open Whisper Systems. It got bought up by Twitter, which wanted co-founder Moxie Marlinspike (not his real name-that’s Matthew Rosenfeld-but an awesome one nonetheless) to beef up its own security. Signal’s history dates back a decade or so, to when a startup called Whisper Systems was developing enterprise mobile security software. Now, here’s a bit of added irony, given the current uproar: WhatsApp’s encryption is so good because it uses Signal’s encrypted-messaging protocol, and has done so since 2016. This encryption is so solid that Brazilian authorities, enraged at being unable to read drug-trafficking suspects’ messages, threw a local Facebook exec in jail five years ago. Despite the misinformation that has been swirling around in recent days, your WhatsApp messages can only be read by you and your correspondents, as long as no-one hacks into your phones. Those are protected by end-to-end encryption, with the encryption key stored on your device. intelligence hoovers up its data-but it’s just fine for most people’s needs. Stuff like your phone number, phone numbers from your address book, details about your operating system and device, plus information about which other Facebook products you’re using.Īll of which may make WhatsApp a questionable choice if you’re a dissident, a spy, or a journalist trying to protect her sources from identification by spies-Facebook has a lousy privacy record after all, and Edward Snowden told the world how U.S. This month’s change really just removes the wording in the privacy policy that referred to the opt-out, while adding information for business users.

At the time, it gave existing users a brief window of opportunity to opt out of the data-sharing, but the vast majority of its users today have never had that opt-out.

Signal messenger security review