WhatsApp Co-Founder Puts $50M Into Signal To Supercharge Encrypted Messaging
In the four or so years since it launched, end-to-end encrypted messaging app Signal has become the security community's gold standard for surveillance-resistant communications. Its creators have built an encryption protocol that companies from WhatsApp to Facebook Messenger to Skype have all added to their own products to offer truly private conversations to billions of people. And it's done so as a non-profit with, at any given moment, a tiny staff that includes just two or three full-time coders. Now imagine what it might accomplish with actual Silicon Valley money behind it.
On Wednesday, the creators of Signal announced the launch of the Signal Foundation, which will build and maintain Signal and potentially other privacy-focused apps to come, too. WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton has also joined as the foundation's executive chairman, his first new role since leaving WhatsApp last fall. And Acton's not only devoting the next phase of his post-WhatsApp career to Signal, but a fair-sized chunk of his WhatsApp billions, too: He's personally injecting $50 million into the project.
