Signal’s president reveals the cost of running the privacy-preserving platform—not just to drum up donations, but to call out the for-profit surveillance business models it competes against.

The encrypted messaging and calling app Signal has become a one-of-a-kind phenomenon in the tech world: It has grown from the preferred encrypted messenger for the paranoid privacy elite into a legitimately mainstream service with hundreds of millions of installs worldwide. And it has done this entirely as a nonprofit effort, with no venture capital or monetization model, all while holding its own against the best-funded Silicon Valley competitors in the world, like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Gmail, and iMessage.

Today, Signal is revealing something about what it takes to pull that off—and it’s not cheap. For the first time, the Signal Foundation that runs the app has published a full breakdown of Signal’s operating costs: around $40 million this year, projected to hit $50 million by 2025.

Signal’s president, Meredith Whittaker, says her decision to publish the detailed cost numbers in a blog post for the first time—going well beyond the IRS disclosures legally required of nonprofits—was more than just as a frank appeal for year-end donations. By revealing the price of operating a modern communications service, she says, she wanted to call attention to how competitors pay these same expenses: either by profiting directly from monetizing users’ data or, she argues, by locking users into networks that very often operate with that same corporate surveillance business model.

“By being honest about these costs ourselves, we believe that helps provide a view of the engine of the tech industry, the surveillance business model, that is not always apparent to people,” Whittaker tells WIRED. Running a service like Signal—or WhatsApp or Gmail or Telegram—is, she says, “surprisingly expensive. You may not know that, and there’s a good reason you don’t know that, and it’s because it’s not something that companies who pay those expenses via surveillance want you to know.”

Signal pays $14 million a year in infrastructure costs, for instance, including the price of servers, bandwidth, and storage. It uses about 20 petabytes per year of bandwidth, or 20 million gigabytes, to enable voice and video calling alone, which comes to $1.7 million a year. The biggest chunk of those infrastructure costs, fully $6 million annually, goes to telecom firms to pay for the SMS text messages Signal uses to send registration codes to verify new Signal accounts’ phone numbers. That cost has gone up, Signal says, as telecom firms charge more for those text messages in an effort to offset the shrinking use of SMS in favor of cheaper services like Signal and WhatsApp worldwide.

Another $19 million a year or so out of Signal’s budget pays for its staff. Signal now employs about 50 people, a far larger team than a few years ago. In 2016, Signal had just three full-time employees working in a single room in a coworking space in San Francisco. “People didn’t take vacations,” Whittaker says. “People didn’t get on planes because they didn’t want to be offline if there was an outage or something.” While that skeleton-crew era is over—Whittaker says it wasn’t sustainable for those few overworked staffers—she argues that a team of 50 people is still a tiny number compared to services with similar-sized user bases, which often have thousands of employees.

read more: https://www.wired.com/story/signal-operating-costs/

archive link: https://archive.ph/O5rzD

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0 points

Because there are no other possible verifications apart from phone numbers? Do you open a bank account with your phone number, because it’s the only way?

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0 points

What would you think would be an appropriate alternative to easily verify chat accounts that’s cheaper than validating phone numbers?

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-3 points

I’d be ok with a credit card verification or so something like that, even if still uncomfortable for me, but I hear it reduces a lot of spam.

But then that would make people confused and make them run away when the app seems to be free and now is asking for a credit card validation… it’s too strange.

Anyway I never got a single spam message on signal from all the years I use it, so not sure how others view the problem or even if it is a problem.

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-1 points

Video call, email, other verificated factors.

So do you think this is the only option available?

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You think a verification via a video call is cheaper than SMS…?

That’s not to mention the potential concerns that would arise around the possibility of signal storing (some portion of) the video…

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0 points

Video call is expensive, and frankly, if I’m gonna sign up at a private service, I’m not going to make a damn video call.

Email is not enough to go against spam. Email addresses are basically an Infinite Ressource.

Other verified factors are nothing concrete. Sure we could all use security hardware keys, but what’s the chances that my mom has one?

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0 points

Use a 3d face scan, but only send the hash over the net. Can double for account recovery (when user has no email or something)

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0 points

That’s a joke right?

If not: It does not matter what hash I send, because it’s cryptographically impossible to tell what the hashed thing is. That is the whole point of a hash.

Also: sending a hash over the network instead of a password or whatever the source material is would be a bad practice from security perspective, if not a directly exploitable vulnerability. It would mean that anyone that knows the hash can pretend to be you, because the hash would be used to authenticate and not whatever the source material is. The hash would become the real password and the source material nothing more than a mnemonic for the user. Adding to that: the server storing the hash would store a plaintext password.

See: https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/8596/https-security-should-password-be-hashed-server-side-or-client-side

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Where would one get a 3d face scan from? For my part, I don’t have a scanning rig set up anywhere.

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