Yeah, and we know the history of NIST and RSA… Even when it is public, you can hide issues. Public is the floor and then we need practices of scrutiny, from the kind of people who watch and guard the Signal code.

Yeah. It concerns me that we live in a world where so much of our critical infrastructure, to which we’re entrusting our social and political institutions, is run by 10 or so corporations who aren’t transparent about what they’re doing.

Co-pilot.

So, we agree?

Well, I don’t think trust is bad but trust is earned. I’m promoting the concept of trust but verifying. This is too important to be left up to personalities or to trust based on charisma. It should not be the norm that we trust marketing materials from corporations who don’t ...

And we have hundreds of people who, every time we push a new build to our GitHub repo, are scrutinizing every line and posting on Reddit, speculating on its use and critiquing, and generally just engaging. It’s actually a real gift to have such a vigilant community who anytime they ...

Yeah, trust. And we also don’t want people to have to trust us because of who we are. We want them to be able to look at all the code and not take our word for it. Which is why the open-source component of how Signal operates is so important. ...

Well, that’s what we count on.

There are many different estimates for when we’ll achieve quantum capabilities and I am not expert enough to predict with any accuracy whether we’re looking at five years, ten years or is it now and the NSA just hasn’t told us. However, I think it would be irresponsible of us ...

I think Signal is a tiny little way that we can interrupt the data pipelines into these systems, so we’re not contributing data to Google that is then used to train models that are then used to affect our lives and understandings and opportunities. Signal is a demonstration, like so ...

Yeah. My scholarly work has primarily been on some of these questions around the technologies we call artificial intelligence and particularly connecting the surveillance business model that underwrites the tech industry today with the emergence of AI and the reliance on the surveillance business model to create and centralize the ...

OK.

I think it’s irresponsible to launch them at this point in time.

Yeah. And the fact that as a rule, the only entities with the resources to build and maintain these systems are large corporations based in China and the U.S., so it’s very likely that the interests that will be served will look more like their interests than others. I’m very ...

And the poles are the U.S. and China, and so it will also… that’s the lens through which everything else will be warped.

Yeah, I’m very concerned.

I’m happy to hear that you’re working on correcting that because language injustice has been a part of tech history for a very long time.

Yeah. I mean… which is very, very expensive.

Yeah. ChatGPT dot Taiwan.

Yeah. The behavior itself is fine, it’s the spam detection that’s the issue, so I think we’ll take a note to talk to the server team and see what options might exist. Again, we’re working with rough heuristics but I think this is something we could explore.

We don’t. We’ve had many requests for organizational accounts and it’s something that is not on our roadmap but it’s on our mental map as something that is important to people. So, we don’t but it’s good to hear that that would be useful to you as well.

And we do have a server team we can talk to around that. Our spam detection is done without the kind of surveillance that most messengers do. It’s primarily reliant on detecting rough patterns and API use, so it’s something we could talk to you about but we want to ...

Yeah. I don’t know if you can speak to some of the bot uses. We would need to look into it a bit more. It can work if people hack it together, get an account, set it up on a server and make it work but it’s not something we’ve ...

OK. Right now, we have not had requests for that often. And Jun, you and I were talking about a few organizations that you’re familiar with who do have that pieced together.

We did a few surveys but not many. This is the first time we’ve been serious about on-the-ground user research. We have a team who were in Tokyo and Seoul, then Taipei. It is a start. I’m just working to understand the landscape better, to understand how much of life ...

So, if there are feedback or feature requests, we would love to hear them here or to be in contact when people in your ministry or people you’re talking to hit a bug or an issue, to ensure that we’re able to fix it. Because that is really the only ...

One of the constraints we have as a privacy-preserving technology that takes that very seriously is that we don’t collect analytics, so we have very limited information on how people use Signal. We know when they registered, their country code, the last time they accessed Signal. And that’s it. But ...

Well, one of the things that we’re doing in Taiwan is user research. We have a team who is not here at this meeting who are on the ground conducting research, working on understanding how people are using Signal and other messaging apps.

Fabulous. Yeah.

Yeah. That’s great to know. And I think Josh will probably be our point of contact on that. He’s been on the phone with our server team to make sure we have up-to-date information.

We’re a small team. We’re a little over 40 people. By comparison, WhatsApp has over a thousand engineers, so we’re happy our team is very, very good. But we’re also small, so we’ll see what we can do with the team. It’s great to have this updated knowledge.

Yeah. Absolutely. And our mission is to make sure that people who need privacy most have it, and everyone else has it too. So, this is very aligned. It is what we believe in and the only reason we exist.

That’s great to know and that updated our knowledge. What we understood was that it would not be possible, so we will take that back to our server team and we’ll be in communication with you.

Okay, wonderful. Yeah, I think um…

Understood. My understanding is that Amazon outposts in Taiwan are just the content delivery network?

So, that is something we’ve taken back to our server team and we’re going to be discussing with them.

I think it’s good for us to understand that that is an urgent and pressing request.

And message queueing is, from a bandwidth perspective, negligible. Right now we use DynamoDB on AWS in North America and all message queuing happens there.

And the rationale for that is that calling, media uploads and downloads are very bandwidth-intensive, so if you have to route around the world for those then that takes… you know… that’s going to be broken.

Josh worked with our server team to make sure we have the most recent information regarding Taiwan. AWS has introduced on-premise content delivery networks, and we use those globally for our calling infrastructure so you can make voice or video calls, and for media uploads and downloads, but not for ...

We use AWS because as you probably know more than most people, effectively no one is able to run their own servers anymore because of the way that the cloud ecosystem has metastasized. So, we use AWS for most of our hosting, although we also have Cloudflare and Google Cloud.

I can give a quick overview.

What features are important, what concerns do you have, and are there ways we can be more responsive to requests, even if it’s technical support, so we can have a better understanding of how we’re supporting people beyond the U.S. and Europe which are currently the contexts we’re most familiar ...

Yeah, but we are very happy to know that your ministry is using Signal and a big reason for our trip is to understand better how we can support people who are using Signal on the ground.

Market forces are powerful and um… don’t always adhere to democratic principles.

Yeah. As a former Google employee, I have some guesses but…

Zero. Yes!

Right. And contributing data back to the training of AI that then further entrenches surveillance as a core engine of the tech industry.

Yeah.

Before I joined Signal, I spent a number of years at NYU as a professor researching artificial intelligence, so I see the issues of artificial intelligence and privacy as very closely connected.