Yeah, keep it touch. Wonderful, thank you. And I love your graphic designs, they look very nice.

Absolutely. Please do… Feel free at any time if you have questions, tech support, ideas… that’s why we’re here.

Thank you. This is great. It’s really nice to meet you all and I hope we stay in touch. And we’d love to…

Yeah, and that uses Signal.

It’s also our failover if we have to join anything that isn’t Signal. We use Google Meet and not others.

Exactly. Yeah.

Yes. It will be a username that you can choose any string and then we’ll append I think it’s three characters or three numbers on the end, so it will be less… The thinking there is that it will be less prone to falsifying identity, so you can’t pretend to ...

Exactly. And that’s something we’ve heard from journalists and others as a request, and it will add one more layer of privacy.

Yeah. And this will not solve that issue but may be interesting for other reasons. This year, we are planning to launch usernames, so you will still need a mobile phone number to register, but if you want to connect with people once you’re registered, you’ll be able to share ...

Yes, SMS verification.

That’s really good to know.

Understood. Our mission is privacy and not user acquisition for its own sake. Right? So, we don’t make money on showing people ads or getting them to add their friends to our network. We just do one thing, and that’s focus on ensuring digital communications are private. So, however we ...

Yeah, understood.

Yeah. Let’s have a conversation about details but um hypothetically that could be possible.

We license the protocol, so if you just email us, we’ll talk about how to do that.

Matrix did a rewrite of our protocol that’s a little bit different, so it is not actually our protocol. So, they did something that is based on the double ratchet algorithm that Trevor and Moxie wrote.

To use an implementation of the protocol?

And now I’m the interoperator.

Oh, okay.

Yeah, and then I can just go on vacation.

Yeah.

So, I don’t see a near future where we are participating in interoperability and to be frank, based on my experience, I think this is going to take a lot longer than the deadline that has been set by the politicians.

We won’t do any interoperating if it doesn’t uphold our rigorous privacy bar and that means message contents are encrypted with the protocol and metadata is encrypted using the techniques that we use to keep it private. Now, how do you interoperate without sharing metadata? This is a very difficult ...

Now on the Signal side, what is our position on this?

So, what I expect is for this to continue moving forward, and that we’ll get a few specs with not enough implementation detail to really operationalize them, and it will likely take longer than 2024 because these standards processes are always more complex than politicians believe.

Now, with the DMA, you have large players who don’t want to and then you have the issue of encryption. I have seen a proposal from Matrix, and I have seen a proposal from Meta. There was a workshop a month or so ago where these were presented and I ...

Well, we don’t meet the threshold as a gatekeeper under the Digital Markets Act so we would not be compelled to interoperate. I’ve been in tech for almost 20 years and I actually started doing work in standards, so I have some sense of how difficult it is to agree ...

Yeah. You’re welcome.

We don’t extend our promises beyond Signal itself and that if you are using Signal in a region that considers the use of Signal to be suspicious and you’re being targeted, that could be an issue.

We do recognize that tools like Pegasus are dangerous and that people who are targeted by tools like Pegasus could be hurt… if someone is able to get access to your device on the same terms that you have, then they will be able to access Signal and any messages ...

I’m not sure from our perspective what that would be. Part of our immune system is the open-source and infosec community that has hammered the protocols, published papers, and that reviews all of our code, so we’re confident that Signal itself is private and secure.

Close-border data protection is very difficult in a globally connected world where only a handful of companies have infrastructure, so I think it’s a very difficult problem given the last 10 years we moved from a world where most organizations ran their own infrastructure to a world where a handful ...

We would like to live in a world where those infrastructures were more trustworthy because they touch a lot of data that isn’t encrypted, but our methodology is that we don’t trust them and we use encryption to allow us to use them anyway.

Almost no one has the resources now to run our own servers. It’s hundreds of millions of dollars a year to run the infrastructure we would need to be highly available across the globe. So like everyone else we use cloud servers. And this is only one of the reasons ...

We both use Cloud and don’t trust Cloud.

I think…

I think education is difficult however, because we are up against narratives that are expertly created by the marketing departments of very interested corporations. And in many cases it’s not a matter of individual choice. Being surveilled by cameras, or by employers, or the reality that we need to use ...

But I think education is imperative. And after education, making sure once you know, you have the ability to actually do something about it. Whether it’s an organization like your ministry saying we use Signal, we use Matrix. and that’s how we’re going to do business. You make that the ...

I think there needs to be an understanding of that and then there needs to be alternatives. Which is why we create Signal Messenger as an alternative. And it’s also why we invest in core technologies like the Signal Protocol and some of the zero-knowledge techniques that we use to ...

Well, I think it is imperative. And I also think that’s the floor. We need to let people know that a lot of the daily habits that rely on surveillance technologies do have a cost, even if that cost isn’t monetary and even if you don’t feel that cost immediately. ...

Another element of Signal is that we are a remote workplace organization so people can live where their families are within the North American time zones, to ensure that we’re able to collaborate in real time.

I do agree that the mission is what attracts people. Once they’re attracted, we need to make sure it’s possible. So, how do we create the environment where they can thrive?

And you know, we are not with-profit. We don’t do profit but we do have an LLC and a 501c3 as a combined entity which is the structure that works for us.

Yes, exactly. So, the Signal Foundation is a non-profit 501c3 and Signal Messenger is an LLC but with the Signal Foundation dedicated to supporting Signal Messenger. So, in practice, it’s the same people and the same organization. I’m president of both but that structure allows us more flexibility.

That’s absolutely right. We pay people and provide a very healthy work environment that everyone who works at Signal believes in. They wake up in the morning and they feel good about what they do and what they build, which is not always the case in a job. And they ...

Exactly.

One of the ways we’re able to remain so small but do so much is that we generally hire senior people who have a lot of experience and they’re able to leverage that experience for Signal. But it’s also important that people aren’t asked to just sacrifice all the time, ...

Happily, in the tech world, there are a lot of people who’ve seen the surveillance model up close and aren’t comfortable with it and want to do something with their lives that has more meaning. So, we actually get very high-qualified applicants.

Well, we try to pay well.

Yeah, very aligned. It’s nice.