THE ALTERNATE UNIVERSE OF MEREDITH WHITAKER
WIRED|November - December 2024
It's free. It doesn't track you or serve you ads. It pays its engineers very well. And it's a go-to app for hundreds of millions of people.
ANDY GREENBERG
THE ALTERNATE UNIVERSE OF MEREDITH WHITAKER

TEN YEARS AGO, WIRED PUBLISHED A news story about how two little-known, slightly ramshackle encryption apps called RedPhone and TextSecure were merging to form something called Signal. Since that July in 2014, Signal has transformed from a cypherpunk curiosity-created by an anarchist coder, run by a scrappy team working in a single room in San Francisco, spread word-of-mouth by hackers competing for paranoia points-into a full-blown, mainstream, encrypted communications phenomenon. Hundreds of millions of people have now downloaded Signal. (Including Drake: "Cuban girl, her family grind coffee," he rapped in his 2022 song "Major Distribution." "Text me on the Signal, don't call me.") Billions more use Signal's encryption protocols integrated into platforms like WhatsApp.

This story is from the November - December 2024 edition of WIRED.

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