Government surveillance is no conspiracy theory and hackers can steal your private details without warning. The historically massive data breach incident at Yahoo should offer enough proof of these facts. Naturally, you’d worry about your privacy online and how you can keep digital communications secure from here on out. You’re not alone thinking about these concerns. After seeing our fair share of nasty hacks and leaks this year, we’ve looked around for an app to help keep digital conversations private. We’ve found one: Signal.
What’s Signal?
Signal an encrypted messaging app that lets you send photos and SMS as well as make secure voice calls. Signal is often considered by many as the best of its kind, though there are several others out there.
To begin using the app, you sign up using your mobile phone number. Before anything else, though, it’ll show you who among your friends uses the service. After signing up, you may then send encrypted text and photos to anyone. By default, only you and the recipient can see the details.
You can also make secure voice calls over a data network with Signal. Calls are often preceded by a verification process to help keep them private. Overall, Signal is dead simple to use and we’d encourage anyone concerned with online privacy to give it a try.
What You Need to Know about Signal
Signal’s code is open source
Unlike its direct competitors, the app’s code is freely available to the public. This is how the developers gain help from experts in inspecting flaws or back doors within the application’s security.
Its developers are supported entirely by donations and grants
With no business model and advertising targets to speak of, Signal is virtually free from ads. That’s probably why its makers intentionally store as little user data as possible. In other words, the company has little interest in covertly keeping and selling your details to corporate partners.
The app offers end-to-end encryption by default
Every message you send is scrambled so it’s virtually indecipherable to anyone who eavesdrops on the conversation. It remains this way even as it passes through the app’s server. No wonder it has earned praise from former CIA whistleblower, Edward Snowden.
Signal’s technology is the standard used by other “secure” messaging systems
The technology used for Signal is so secure that it sets the standards by which other messaging services follow. Even with that, security experts like Bruce Schneier and Matt Green prefer Signal over others because of its tough encryption and unwavering drive to protect user privacy.
The app works on every imaginable device
Signal works across various devices, whether you plan to run one on a desktop computer or a mobile phone. Its ability to synchronize between gadgets is mighty impressive when you consider the fact that Signal doesn’t even record any personal information about you.
You can download and use Signal absolutely FREE
The app isn’t just easy to install, you can download it free for iOS and Android devices. For computers, simply enable its free add-on on a Google Chrome browser.
Signal app Alternatives?
As mentioned earlier, Signal isn’t the only encrypted messaging app at your disposal. The more popular WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and Google Allo all share the same encrypted feature.
Unlike Signal, though, WhatsApp retains certain meta data on conversations. This may include phone numbers used in exchanges as well as the times when messages were sent. Plus, it regularly accesses contacts to provide you with an up-to-date list of contacts that use the service.
Meanwhile, Facebook’s Messenger also provides end-to-end encryption. Where it differs with Signal is that it only enables this feature inside a private chat mode: Secret Conversations. Under normal circumstances, Messenger chat doesn’t offer encryption at all.
Then there’s Google’s newest messaging app, Google Allo. By default, it offers full encrypted messaging via Incognito sessions that you need to enable manually. The messaging service doesn’t enable encryption most of the time because the app requires your data to leverage artificial intelligence. In other words, Google typically stores every one of your Allo messages on its servers.
We think anybody concerned about online privacy should give Signal a try. It’s a cinch to use and architecturally secure that you could be saying whatever any time, confident that no one could be spying on you. Feel free to use it exclusively for sensitive matters and work-related exchanges.
Keep in mind, though, that encryption can only do so much to stop the NSA or the most cunning cyber criminals from stealing your data. Even so, we’re sure you’d rather have some level of protection against snoops and hacks any day.
