By now, most of my world and tech world has heard about Whatsapp’s latest privacy flaws! (Just a FYI – the bulk of the painful Whatsapp update that was released on Jan 4th 2021, was that Whatsapp is going to be sharing your information with Facebook and its companies ! You can read more about the latest Whatsapp update here in this post)
While violation of privacy is nothing new in today’s world, just the thought that an end-to-end encrypted platform can defy privacy is too much to bear for most of us!
Having said that, will I move to Signal or any other platform is a question that has been frequently asked to me! 🙂 I have no idea what I will be doing after Feb 8, 2021, but safe to say that I will inform everyone about it! 🙂
But before we decide to move to Signal, let us do a comparison between between Whatsapp and Signal in this post:
| Signal | ||
| 1 | Launched in 2009 | Launched in 2014 |
| 2 | WhatsApp was founded by Jan Koum and Brian Acton who had previously spent 20 years combined at Yahoo. WhatsApp joined Facebook in 2014, but continued to operate as a separate app/ | Signal was founded by founded by Moxie Marlinspike and Brian Acton in 2018 to take over the role of the Open Whisper Systems project that was founded by Marlinspike in 2013. |
| 3 | Whatsapp is owned by Facebook | Signal is an independent nonprofit organization. They are not tied to any major tech companies, and hence they cannot be acquired by any one. |
| 4 | Whatsapp is a free, simple and reliable messaging platform with end-to-end encryption | Signal is a free, state-of-the-art end-to-end encrypted messaging platform |
| 5 | Whatsapp is a Proprietary freeware which means that even though the software is free, the source code is not freely available | Signal has the ‘GPL v3’ license which means that users can run, study and modify the software. It is powered by Open Source Signal platform/ |
| 6 | More than 2 billion people in over 180 countries use WhatsApp!! | Signal is used by Jack Dorsey (CEO of Twitter and Square), Edward Snowden (Whistleblower and privacy advocate) and many other privacy advocates |
Having compared the two messaging platforms, ‘Signal’ seems to be a great messenger focused on privacy as of today! Since it is open source and cannot be acquired by any one as of today, it seems safe to migrate to this new platform as of today!
But time will tell one way or other and it will always be good to do a little or a lot of homework before moving!
Stay safe!