Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive • Hacker News Board

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#361

Post by halyconWays » Thu, Nov 16, 2023, 6:14 PM UTC

charles_f wrote: post #279

You have to appreciate the complete transparency, gently nudging towards giving without ever begging for it. Refreshing compared to the alternative that Wikipedia is showing, with the tantrum-like emails we receive from their CEO like "LAST REMINDER" or "We've had enough" ; which they ironically send to people who gave.

Wikipedia is particularly insulting because they make enough money to cover the actual costs of running Wikipedia (the site) in days if not hours, and could operate for years without any additional donations: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32840097

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#362

Post by chefandy » Thu, Nov 16, 2023, 6:15 PM UTC

Dunedan wrote: post #2

> 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. Signal pays more for delivering verification SMS during sign-up, than for all other infrastructure (except traffic) combined. Wow, that sounds excessive.

I wish their justification for dropping SMS capability from their Android app to move away from phone numbers was a little more transparent about the obvious cost aspect rather than solely sticking to the patronizing "we're saving insecure messaging users from themselves" messaging they had. I found it pretty obnoxious. I think people generally get "valuable nonprofit + huge expense = not-sustainable = bad."

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#363

Post by wolverine876 » Thu, Nov 16, 2023, 6:15 PM UTC

Support for Signal development supports all privacy-oriented software and systems, because Signal is open source.

The Signal Protocol already is an industry standard. What other Signal development - either the components, the code, or the concepts - are used by others?

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#364

Post by sam_lowry_ » Thu, Nov 16, 2023, 6:16 PM UTC

rasso wrote: post #351

nvy wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of people, myself included, have it installed but never use it after they dropped SMS support. Only a tiny fraction of my contacts use Signal, and most of those are also on Whatsapp, Telegram, Discord, and others. Signal offers essentially nothing to me.

Except real privacy?

Not even that, because it is linked to phone numbers.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#365

Post by xor25519 » Thu, Nov 16, 2023, 6:18 PM UTC

Given the few fees, what about charging/giving the option to pay $1/year? Whatsapp had this in practice before they got acquired.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#366

Post by contact9879 » Thu, Nov 16, 2023, 6:18 PM UTC

hansSjoberg wrote: post #169

rodlette wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have devs and support engineers earning 700k, more than the CTO?

700k to drag your feet on implementing usernames for a full decade, seems cushy.

It's in testing now; you'll soon have to switch to complaining about some other thing.

Anyway, considering usernames required an extensive redesign of how Signal works, it's not surprising it took 5 years (3 years of full time)

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#367

Post by nonameiguess » Thu, Nov 16, 2023, 6:18 PM UTC

melbourne_mat wrote: post #322

Total salary bill: $20m. 50 staff so average salary: $400k. I'd be happy with $200k USD - that's more than I get paid in my country at current exchange rates.

I've actually posted Signal's tax return before, but a great thing about US nonprofits is the tax return is publicly available from the IRS website: https://apps.irs.gov/pub/epostcard/cor/824506840_202012_990_...

The last one available is from 2020, though. They tend to lag a few years behind. They're required to report key employees plus top-five compensated who aren't "key." Brian Acton and Meredith Whittaker both earn no salary at all. Their COO got $290 in 2020. Moxie Marlinspike and their top five developers/managers were all in the 400-600 range.

I'm sure they pay well (don't have much choice if you're going to be based in San Francisco), but I highly doubt 400 is an average salary. The expense being reported is total cost of employment, which includes FICA taxes paid by the employer, 401k matches, and probably most notably healthcare, but all benefits and in-kind compensation.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#368

Post by lxgr » Thu, Nov 16, 2023, 6:18 PM UTC

munk-a wrote: post #195

cmiles74 wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Messages inflexible reliance on SMS for communication to non-Apple devices is definitely an Apple issue, in my opinion. Apple has made it clear that they continue to default to SMS for non-iPhone communication solely because it's unpleasant for everyone involved.

There's apparently even "green bubble bullying"[1] of kids who have Android devices and thus have their messages appear different. In this particular way Apple is happy compromising the mental health of young people to secure a larger market share - it's awful and they deserve a lot more negative PR for it. 1. https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-apples-imessage-is-winning-...

> In this particular way Apple is happy compromising the mental health of young people to secure a larger market share

Should we also force luxury brands to offer stipends so that teenagers whose parents can't afford them (or simply don't want to participate in that nonsense) don't feel stigmatized?

It would be a completely different story if Apple were to ban third-party messaging apps on their platform, but as restrictive as they are in other areas, they aren't doing that.

It literally only takes a free app download to get a cross-platform messaging experience at least on par with iMessage (and in my personal view superior in many regards).

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#369

Post by hnlmorg » Thu, Nov 16, 2023, 6:18 PM UTC

nwellinghoff wrote: post #282

Wish they provided some numbers of actual messages, type etc. per day. Seems like a good game plan would be. 1) Get off the major cloud providers that charge insane egress fees. 2) Remove SMS verification. A simple solution might be the app gives you a code and then you dial in to them and punch in the code to them. Like a reverse voice based authentication. 3) Remove voice and video calling for non donating users. 3…

> Get off the major cloud providers that charge insane egress fees

At on demand prices, yeah. But companies of sufficient demand can enter into volume discount programmes.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#370

Post by dghlsakjg » Thu, Nov 16, 2023, 6:20 PM UTC

lxgr wrote: post #327

dghlsakjg wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not who you are responding to, but my guess is that it was all fixed costs. They spend $20mm (or whatever) to maintain access, and maintain infrastructure and they get to send as many SMS messages as they want. So sending 1 costs the same as sending a 10 million. It isn't that they are free to send, its that they are charged for access to the system, but aren't charged per message.

> spend $20mm (or whatever) to maintain access, and maintain infrastructure and they get to send as many SMS messages as they want. This is not how SMS pricing works in many, if not, most countries.

Is that true at scale? If I tell the telecoms that I want to send a billion messages per year it seems like they might be willing to take a lump sum instead of setting up the systems to bill based on usage.

I have no experience directly with foreign telecoms, so I was simply explaining how something with no marginal cost could still be a very expensive system.