At WIRED’s The Big Interview event, the president of the Signal Foundation talked about secure communications as critical infrastructure and the need for a new funding paradigm for tech.
Meredith Whittaker at The Big Interview WIRED event.Photograph: Tristan deBrauwere
The secure messaging app Signal is famous for knowing as little about its users as possible. The app isn’t hoarding metadata, tracking you, or showing you ads—in other words, it’s not monetizing user data. Instead, the Signal Foundation is a nonprofit. Its president, Meredith Whittaker, sees a massive shift underway and an “invitation for action” as the monoliths of Big Tech lose popularity and the old economics of Silicon Valley become brittle.
At WIRED’s The Big Interview event in San Francisco on Tuesday, Whittaker talked about Signal’s increasing role as critical infrastructure for communication around the world, and the contributions it can make in developing a new model for funding vital tech projects.
Signal “is something it is clear there is a market for and people want, and yet we have to squeeze ourselves into a nonprofit shape that is not quite conducive for the high availability real-time tech we are maintaining and developing,” Whittaker said at the event, “simply because there’s no real way to make a profit in the tech industry given the surveillance incentives.”
As a messaging and calling app, Signal aims to be as simple and easy to use as possible so people don’t have to sacrifice user experience to communicate privately. The app doesn’t have a social media component and there are no plans to integrate AI, but Signal still regularly comes out with new features to make the app more robust. Whittaker told the Big Interview audience, for example, that the team is working on eventually adding functionality to support encrypted backups. (She later confirmed to WIRED that the feature is coming in 2025.)
Meredith Wittaker in conversation with Brian Barrett at The Big IntervivewPhotograph: Tristan deBrauwere
“We don’t want to be the outlier that proves the rule, we want to be a new set of rules leading the way to a much more open and diverse tech ecosystem,” Whittaker said, “that isn’t reliant on like five companies and 15 guys and a paradigm that is very, very stale and ultimately not healthy for the world and the future.”
It costs around $50 million per year to run Signal, and Whittaker noted at the event that there are no easy answers to finding that type of funding—or more—for projects that need consistent, independent, and secure backing without being subject to the forces of data monetization and surveillance capitalism.
“None of this is simple, friend,” Whittaker said. “There’s a type of capital we need. How do we get it?”
The first Trump presidency in the United States was increasingly hostile to encryption and independent tech, so with a new Trump administration looming and anti-encryption advocates making inroads in governments around the world, what comes next for Signal?
“Signal knows who we are. Signal will continue being Signal,” Whittaker says. “Signal has one thing we do, and we do it really well and we do it pretty obsessively, and that is: provide truly private communications infrastructure to everyone, everywhere, globally. Full stop. We’re not changing.”
