1y ago

Privacy is Priceless, but Signal is Expensive

signal.org Privacy is Priceless, but Signal is Expensive

Signal is the world’s most widely used truly private messaging app, and our cryptographic technologies provide extra layers of privacy beyond the Signal app itself. Since launching in 2013, the Signal Protocol—our end-to-end encryption technology—has become the de facto standard for private commu...

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.

Technology @lemmy.world

Privacy is Priceless, but Signal is Expensive

signal.org /blog/signal-is-expensive/

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113 comments

Funnily enough their biggest expense (sending SMS during registration) is making the accounts less private.
- I imagine not paying for it and being overloaded with spam bots would be more expensive (otherwise they wouldn't be doing it this way!)
  
  There are lots of reasons to want fewer spam bots and verified identities other than cost.
- Privacy and anonymity are not the same thing.
  
  Anonymity is a form of privacy. While for most people it's not necessary to be anonymous to have privacy, it's essential in some cases, like whistleblowers or people living under dictatorships (or even in some democracies where governments keeps trying to get their paws on all metadata).

They could save a lot on infrastructure costs if they decentralised their network and stopped using phone numbers as unique identifiers.
- I'm all for decentralised networks, but they do have their flaws. I use Matrix every day, and there are a lot of times the keys need to be resent, messages don't get sent or deleted on shaky internet, etc. Issues like this make it seem broken to normies. Signal Just Works™️
  
  Absolutely, and I use Signal for a few things. It's not a perfect solution, but it's far better than most (looking at you, Facebook's WhatsApp, with your previous Pegasus attack vector).
  
  Signal Just Works™️
  Until you drop your phone in the swimming pool, and every message/photo you've ever received is just... gone. Forever.
  Sorry but I don't buy any claim that Signal "just works". It's pretty clear they care about security more than anything else even when that means making decisions that are user hostile. And that's fine - if you feel like you need that level of security I'm glad Signal exists. But it doesn't really align with the general public and Signal is never going to be a mass market messaging service unless something changes (Signal or the general public).
  What's weird to me is an app that excludes itself from phone backups considers SMS a valid form of authentication when a user links a device to a phone number - especially when you can necessarily link a device to a number that is already tied to someone else's device. Like how is that ever going to be secure? Spoiler: it's not. It'd make a lot more sense to me if users simply crated a username and shared it with other people instead of a phone number... and if they forget their password... come up with new username.
- How?
  
  Quote from the blog post:
  Registration Fees
  Signal incurs expenses when people download Signal and sign up for an account, or when they re-register on a new device. We use third-party services to send a registration code via SMS or voice call in order to verify that the person in possession of a given phone number actually intended to sign up for a Signal account. This is a critical step in helping to prevent spam accounts from signing up for the service and rendering it completely unusable—a non-trivial problem for any popular messaging app.
  SMS verification is expensive.
  Obviously, running the infrastructure to support the entire user base is also expensive. Decentralized protocols like Matrix sidestep this problem by allowing anyone to host their own infrastructure to use the network. Even if the largest Matrix server shuts down, the network will live on, and people can migrate to another server or host their own. This distributes the costs and allows for different business models to support those costs -- commercial, non-profit, cooperative, whatever. Corporations can (and do) host their own Matrix servers for their employees, for instance. I wouldn't be surprised to see universities do the same, like they frequently do with email.
  
  There's an IETF internet standard for federated messaging called XMPP. Just be compatible with the standard. It also allows for extensions if you offer more than the core spec.
  
  There's a few forks that have done it. You could also look to Matrix to see how they've done it.
- November 9th, the verge: Signal tests usernames so you can avoid sharing your phone number
  
  the phone number is still going to be required for making an account, you can just choose to not share it with others and give them your username instead.
  
  Yes but you still need one and you still lose access to your account if you lose your number.

In total, around 50 full-time employees currently work on Signal
[...]
When benefits, HR services, taxes, recruiting, and salaries are included, this translates to around $19 million dollars per year.
That's 380k/employee on average. Even if half of that went to taxes and other expenses, on average they're paying their employees around 190k/year.
Bro, as a European dev, that's triple my salary! They could possibly double or triple their workforce if they hired from outside of the US.
- When running a business, you need to budget 3x salary for actual TCO of a staff member:
  1x covers their direct salary 2x covers retirement fund, electricity, office space, and infrastructure items unlike server and laptops for corporate use etc.
  The 3x multiplier is for when you're a services company, and that represents a possibly profit margin.
  So for signal, your $380k becomes $190k which in my experience is average for a US tech sw dev at a mid to early senior level.
  I donate to signal monthly and I have no problems with the costs they're posting. I work in SV tech and I've seen 20x worse numbers.
  
  I’m extremely curious where you get those numbers from, I operate businesses and that doesn’t pass the sniff test.
  
  3x is too much tbh. It's more like 2x in total, at least going by european points of view - I don't know what would make the US more expensive though with even less welfare. And office space in these days is a diminishing cost of course with all the hybrid/remote options. Laptops cost is pretty negligible. I think Signal does have a lot of hosting costs though.
- As an American dev, you should check out other silicon valley salaries. After hearing what some folks there make 190k doesn't make me bat an eye.
  
  True, but Signal is choosing to hire such people. There's talent all over the world and all over the US. There's absolutely no need to only hire people from one highly expensive region.
- I don't care if employees are well paid. I do care that Signal takes 50 employees to operate. What are they all doing? This is a genuine question
  
  You did not read the article, did you?
  This is a lot of work, and we do it with a small and mighty team. In total, around 50 full-time employees currently work on Signal, a number that is shockingly small by industry standards. For example, LINE Corporation, the developers of the LINE messaging app popular in Japan, has around 3,100 employees, while the division of Kakao Corp that develops KakaoTalk, a messaging app popular in Korea, has around 4,000 employees. Employee counts at bigger corporations like Malus, Meta, and Google’s parent company (Alphabet) are much, much higher.
  
  When Whatsapp was sold to Facebook in 2014, they had 55 employees. Considering the app had considerably less features and did not focus so heavily on encryption and privacy, Signal can be considered even leaner than Whatsapp.
  Now, for the actual breakdown, they have at least the following technical teams: desktop, android, iOS, server, calls (ringrtc), core (libsignal). If we assume a team has usually 5 people (manager, Sr SWE, Jr SWE, QA, maybe PM), that's already 30 people. On top of that, they have an in house support team (don't know the size but I wouldn't be surprised if they have 10ppl on the payroll considering the number of signal users) and management (CEO, CTO, CSO, VP), which will quickly add up to around 50.
  
  Purged by creator
- That is indeed a lot. They must have most of these in Silicon Valley.
  However it is their choice to do so. They don't have to be in the most expensive place in the world for developers.
  I prefer sponsoring matrix though as it's really open. Signal is just a slightly nicer walled garden. Also, Matrix doesn't need to be linked to my mobile number which is a godsend because I tend to change those once in a while and it's a real nightmare bringing all whatsapp contacts over.

Is it just me or is $19 million per year for 50 full-time employees insane?
Even for US salary standards.
- Not necessarily.
  Signal has people who are experts in their field. They engineer solutions that don't exist anywhere else in the market to ensure they have as little information on you as possible while keeping you secure [0]. This in turn means high compensation + benefits. You don't want to be paying your key developers peanuts as that makes them liable to taking bribes from adversaries to "oops" a security vulnerability in the service. In addition, the higher compensation is a great way to mitigate losing talent to private organizations who can afford it.
  [0] Signal has engineered the following technologies that all work to ensure your privacy and security:
  Post-Quantum Computing Resistance
  Private Stories
  Group calling
  Private admin permissions
  Secure Value Recovery
  Private Stickers
  Sealed Sender
  Private GIF search
  Private Contact Discovery
  Encrypted Profiles
  Reproducible Builds
  
  At least the private contact discovery is not very private:
  The client calculates the truncated SHA256 hash of each phone number in the device’s address book.
  The client transmits those truncated hashes to the service.
  Phone numbers are so not-sparse that there even was a game to text your "number neighbor". I can probably build a pretty effective rainbow table for this with my current hardware.
- My guess: People who can be as competent with security as they need are very expensive.
- For the current distribution I quote from the linked source :
  Current Infrastructure Costs (as of November 2023): Approximately $14 million dollars per year.
  Storage: $1.3 million dollars per year.
  Servers: $2.9 million dollars per year.
  Registration Fees: $6 million dollars per year.
  Total Bandwidth: $2.8 million dollars per year.
  Additional Services: $700,000 dollars per year.
  
  Yes, but I was talking about the salary part, which is separate from the costs you mentioned.
  It's 19 million just for people.
  
  Also from the source:
  To sustain our ongoing development efforts, about half of Signal’s overall operating budget goes towards recruiting, compensating, and retaining the people who build and care for Signal. When benefits, HR services, taxes, recruiting, and salaries are included, this translates to around $19 million dollars per year.
- Not at all. That's $380K per person if everyone is making the same. Engineers with a few years of experience at Meta make $400K+.
  
  Don't forget the employer taxes, insurance, recruitment costs and so on. It wouldn't surprise me if the employees are earning on average half that.
- Role of thumb is an employee costs roughly twice their base salary, as the employee still needs to cover insurance, taxes, sick time, and other benefits.
  That leaves an average salary of 190K for the 50 employees. That isn't much for tech.

Would be interesting to see how this compares to XMPP or Matrix. Obviously the development costs something for each of those, but the hosting costs are spread out across each of those hosting an instance.
- Yup, that's a big reason why centralized protocols aren't sustainable. XMPP is 25 years old (which is older than almost anything else on the contemporary internet) and thriving. Unfortunately, judging by the cycle of messengers coming and dying, and people still being eagerly part of that, this isn't something that people value very much.
- Forgive the ignorance but does xmpp have the same features as signal, particularly around e2e encryption?
  
  It's possible to implement XMPP with E2E encryption, there are at least 2 ways to do it.
  But of course it only works if both users use a client and server that support it.

Are decentralised apps like element much less expensive ?
- The costs are distributed as there is not one single instance. Just like with Lemmy.
  Although there is one huge instance on matrix (matrix.org), a bit like lemmy.ml here. But it doesn't have to be like that, they can close signups or discourage them similar to the way lemmy.ml is doing that now.
- The load distributes across more shoulders automatically.
  If you only host a server for yourself and 10 friends it costs next to nothing, if you have a big operation it can get just as expensive, it depends on what you are willing to do.
  With centralized systems there is no choice but for the one centralized host to host everything.
  
  Then is it better to use element over signal as decentralised apps may be more sustainable for long term use ?
- Element has the same costs as Signal. So far, Element has been lucky in being able to raise money by selling support contracts to governments or companies using Matrix, but even that isn't enough, which is why Element has been raising money for the Matrix Foundation for almost a year now (with little success).
  
  No but they do have commercial clients, even some government departments.
  They're also trying to sell Element One directly to end users which involved a few bridges like connection to whatsapp, signal and telegram. Not a bad deal for 5 bucks a month IMO, though I run mine myself because I want to.
  There's also beeper which sells a service with (a lot) more bridges than Element One but costs twice the price. Their company sponsors most of the bridge development as they employ the main bridge developer.

They should do a charity stream event or something. Do Q&A stuff, get interest of more people, and raise money?

SimpleX Chat
- Indeed. Same tech as Signal (minus the new quantum insurance thing) but without needing a phone number. Unfortunately it is buggy re invitations.

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