On November 16th, Meredith Whittaker, President of Signal, published a detailed breakdown of the popular encrypted messaging app’s running costs for the very first time. The unprecedented disclosure’s motivation was simple - the platform is rapidly running out of money, and in dire need of donations to stay afloat. Unmentioned by Whittaker, this budget shortfall results in large part from the US intelligence community, which lavishly financed Signal’s creation and maintenance over several years, severing its support for the app.
  • Pfosten@feddit.deEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    This article is ahistoric and unnecessarily conspirational.

    Signal and its predecessors like TextSecure have been run by different companies/organizations:

    • Whisper Systems
    • Open Whisper Systems
    • Signal Technology Foundation (and its subsidiary Signal Messenger LLC)

    Open Whisper Systems received about 3M USD total from the US government via the Open Technology Fund for the purpose of technology development … during 2013 to 2016. Source: archive of the OTF website: https://web.archive.org/web/20221015073552/https://www.opentech.fund/results/supported-projects/open-whisper-systems/

    The Signal Foundation (founded 2018) was started by an 105M USD interest free loan from Brian Acton, known for co-founding WhatsApp and selling it to Facebook (now Meta).

    So important key insights:

    • It doesn’t seem like the Signal Foundation received US government funding. (Though I haven’t checked financial statements.)
    • The US government funding seems to be a thing of the fairly distant past (2016). The article makes it sound like the funding was just pulled this year.
    • The US government funding was small compared to Signal’s current annual budget. It was not small at the time, but now Signal regularly makes more from licensing its technology than it regularly received from the US government. According to ProPublica, Signals financial statements for 2022 indicate revenue of about 26M USD