Signal app President Meredith Whittaker on messaging privacy

This comment from Whittaker responding to the lack of a policy team at Signal and if that is a disadvantage. I so love this response. 🤩

On the infrastructural disadvantage, that’s true, but we also have the advantage of … we don’t have to be full of shit. We’re not actually a surveillance company. I’m not trying to pretend Facebook is good. I don’t have to toe a party line that is divorced from reality. And we aren’t Big Tech.

And it just continues with delightful stuff. I absolutely love the idea of Signal telling government to send their requests to a PO Box! (bolding mine)

My answer to that is actually, I don’t know. It’s actually difficult to authenticate requests, right? You get an email and there’s a little footer and it could be spoofed or not. The big companies have a huge apparatus for authentication. So there’s actually a resource issue around that. If you want to process a request to Signal, there’s a P.O. box to send it to, it’s authorized, and that gets checked periodically.

I’m not an active user of Signal, but I do have it on my devices and have an account. iMessage encryption is good enough for me. But I absolutely love that Signal exists, and that it is being led by folks like Whittaker. We need fighters to protect our privacy, and she is absolutely one!