#Signal#Cybersecurity#Privacy#Messaging: "Signal is a nonprofit, but we’re playing in a lane dominated by multi-billion-dollar corporations that have defined the norms and established the tech ecosystem, and whose business models directly contravene our privacy mission. So in order to provide a genuinely useful alternative, Signal spends tens of millions of dollars every year. We estimate that by 2025, Signal will require approximately $50 million dollars a year to operate—and this is very lean compared to other popular messaging apps that don’t respect your privacy.
Here we review some of these costs and where this money goes, in the name of providing more transparency into Signal. But we hope to do more than that. Where money goes and how it’s made is a bit of a taboo in tech, something that most tech companies avoid talking about. The actual costs of consumer tech are generally hidden behind stories of innovation and the word “free,” and the connection between the product marketing of a highly profitable tech industry and the ingress and egress of profit and revenue is usually unclear. We believe a material map of these dynamics can help clarify just what is required to fulfill the dream of privacy-preserving alternative technology, and contribute to establishing a solid foundation from which we can grow alternatives that contest tech surveillance and the incentives behind it."
