As president, Whittaker will help guide strategy, communications and policy. In an interview, she said she plans to focus on sustaining Signal, which depends on donations from users. Signal announced her new role on Monday at an event in Berlin.
“It costs tens of millions of dollars per year to develop and maintain an app like Signal,” she said.
The only way to escape technology that makes money off your data is by paying for products that don’t, Whittaker says. An alternative to data collection only exists if the community of people who rely on it “kick in a little bit,” she said.
Signal is one of the few successful tech products, like the Firefox browser, led by vociferous critics of Big Tech. The app offers end-to-end encryption on text, voice, and video chat and does not store backups of your data on its servers — a viable alternative to relentless data gathering at the center of tech industry critiques.
Whittaker, who has been a member of Signal’s board since 2020, rose to prominence in tech circles for worker activism at Google before she was ousted from the company — and for the research center she co-founded to raise awareness about the social implications of artificial intelligence, called AI Now Institute. Most recently, Federal Trade Commissioner Lina Khan tapped Whittaker as a senior adviser on AI.
Signal was released in 2014 by encryption evangelist Moxie Marlinspike, the former head of security for Twitter, and it expanded in 2018 thanks to a $50 million interest-free loan from Brian Acton, the WhatsApp co-founder who has called out Facebook for privacy violations. Whittaker first met Marlinspike when they were both part of an open source software community exploring privacy protecting tech.
Whittaker’s arrival comes at an inflection point for the company. Marlinspike stepped down as CEO in January, after roughly a decade at the helm, and Acton took over in an interim capacity. (Signal’s three-person board is Marlinspike, Acton, and Whittaker.) The company is still searching for a new chief. “It’s got to be the right person,” said Whittaker. “We have the luxury to take our time.”
The app experienced a massive spike in downloads last year during a privacy backlash after WhatsApp changed its policy on data collection on user interactions with businesses. Signal currently has 140.9 million downloads across the App Store and Google Play, with India and the United States each having about 16 percent of its users, according to Sensor Tower, a mobile analytics company. That compares with WhatsApp, which passed 2 billion downloads in 2019, Telegram, which passed 1 billion downloads in 2021, and iMessage, which comes pre-installed on iPhones.
Whittaker differentiated Signal’s strategy from the fast growth mantra of most Silicon Valley tech companies. Signal is not interested in increasing profit or attention on ads, but rather creating a network effect of encrypted communication, she said.
“The more people who use Signal, the more people we can talk to on Signal, that’s more people whose communication is private and encrypted,” she said. “We do have growth goals, but they are driven by our mission, not by a desire for profit.”
There has been a greater focus on encrypted messaging in recent years because of crackdowns against dissidents around the globe, political upheaval, and growing awareness of how easily private chats can be shared without consent. Signal’s protections stand out from even privacy-minded competitors like WhatsApp and Telegram, experts say. Signal has default end-to-end encryption, unlike Telegram, which uses cloud backups. WhatsApp, which has backups turned off by default and began offering end-to-end encrypted backups last year, shares metadata with its parent company Meta.
“Providing secure end-to-end encrypted messaging for the world is the bedrock of WhatsApp,” said WhatsApp spokesperson Carl Woog. He added that WhatsApp does not share user contacts, location or chats with Meta. Apple and Telegram did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
In fact, to provide end-to-end encryption, WhatsApp and many other services use Signal Protocol, an open source technology developed by the same group behind Signal.
Regardless, few consumers put privacy first, said Jamie MacEwan, senior media analyst at Enders Analysis, a firm that analyses new technologies and media.
“About 10 percent of people say they have reported companies to data authorities or asked them to delete data. About half of people take smaller-scale action like changing their privacy settings,” MacEwan said.
Signal has cultural clout that is surprising for its size, however. The app is popular with techies and journalists, and crossed over to White House aides, Black Lives Matters protesters, sports stars, as well as Oath Keepers. It had a cameo on the HBO teen drama Euphoria in 2019.
During her time at Google, Whittaker led product and engineering teams in Google Research and Google Cloud. She emerged as a tech critic when she helped draft a petition in 2018 against Project Maven, Google’s contract to help the Pentagon improve computer vision for drones, which said that Google should not be in the business of war. She later became known for helping to organize a companywide walkout to protest Google’s mishandling of sexual harassment claims.
Although it may seem removed from Signal’s mission, Whittaker sees a through-line in her work on challenging the business model behind AI.
The dominant trend in AI is building large-scale systems that require inordinate amounts of data, including personal data on internet users. “These are the resources that are concentrated in the hands of the Big Tech companies,” Whittaker explained. These AI models are a way to “expand the profitability of surveillance data and grow the reach of the companies that produce it.”
Whittaker is bringing more transparency to the costs of operation, such as experts in maintaining code for iOS, Android and desktop, and registration and hosting. Signal offers users an option to make one time donations or earn different badges for monthly donations of $5, $10, or $20 a month, and gift a badge to others.
Telegram, which raised $1.7 billion through a cryptocurrency scheme called an initial coin offering, launched a premium subscription this summer, charging users $5.99 per month for access to exclusive features, faster downloads, and other perks. WhatsApp at one point charged some users 99 cents a year, but dropped that after Facebook bought the app for $16 billion.
But don’t expect a Wikipedia-esque monthly banner on Signal. “We are definitely hoping to get the word out now and we also don’t want to hit people over the head with it,” Whittaker said. “You get on Signal because you want to answer that group text or you want to contact someone, not because you want to read Signal’s text about itself.”
