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

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#181

Post by gamblor956 » Thu, Nov 16, 2023, 5:23 PM UTC

datpiff wrote: post #66

vjk800 wrote: post #29

> 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. What? I know silicon valley salaries are a thing, but absolutely everywhere else in the world this would be insane. Maybe change the headquarters to somewhere cheaper?

Costs for staff are not just salaries. It's also pensions, taxes, benefits, the offices, software licenses and all the other stuff. I've often heard 50% of total cost going to salary, but it varies. Still does seem high though.

Pensions aren't a thing in the U.S. anymore, especially not for tech. And when a U.S. company says "staffing costs" that does not include licenses, offices, etc. It's strictly salary and benefits.

According to Signal's 990, it's paying multiple employees over $700k. That's above-market for corporate compensation, and it's way above market for non-profit compensation, to the point where it could be considered private inurement.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#182

Post by leptons » Thu, Nov 16, 2023, 5:23 PM UTC

V__ wrote: post #36

Signal had 40 million active users in 2021 [1]. With 14 million in infra cost, that comes to .35 per user/year. Total expenses are about 33 million, so about .825 per user/year. All in all that seems very reasonable. [1] https://www.businessofapps.com/data/signal-statistics/

I'd be happy to pay $1/year for signal, and I'd pay $2/year if it were decoupled from my phone number.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#183

Post by NotYourLawyer » Thu, Nov 16, 2023, 5:23 PM UTC

nvrmnd wrote: post #80

I donate to signal, and use it frequently. But I would much prefer for the app to simply charge users rather than beg for donations. Even better would be to charge users in a way that reflects the costs. For instance, maybe verifying a new number over SMS should cost $0.10 if that's going to make up 14% of the operating costs. Begging for donations to subsidize excessive use by other users just doesn't seem sustainab…

Yes, let’s tie every user of this privacy-focused messaging platform to a credit card number.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#184

Post by explaininjs » Thu, Nov 16, 2023, 5:23 PM UTC

supriyo-biswas wrote: post #28

jawns wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Phone numbers have become the de facto version of "Internet stamps" for identity verification. They are near-ubiquitous on a per-user level, but hard to accumulate without significant cost. (Unlike email addresses.) But the down side is that phone verification tends to be on a per-service level. So, for instance, Signal incurs these costs when they verify their users, and every other service incurs these same costs w…

Phone number verification is used to verify the user's registration intent, so not really.

A Flow:

> Service A => User: Please Enter Your Phone Number and Email

> Service A => Clearinghouse: Please verify phone number XXX wants to sign up for an account with us

> Clearinghouse => User (SMS): Please respond with the Email you used at signup to confirm you want an account with Service A

Later...

> Service B => User: Please Enter Your phone number and Email

> Service B => Clearinghouse: Please verify phone number XXX wants to sign up for an account with us

> Clearinghouse => User (Email): Please verify you want an account with Service B

Not saying it's great (providing email twice is annoying), but it's something.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#185

Post by AnthonyMouse » Thu, Nov 16, 2023, 5:23 PM UTC

cl3misch wrote: post #94

jph wrote: post #21

Signal can be better, IMHO, by separating from phone number requirements. In other words, let users have secure random ids, rather than forcing each user to hand over their phone number for phone company verification. It turns out the budget shows the phone number registration problem: the costs to deal with phone number verification seem to be $6MM, which seems to be 10% of the entire budget. If Signal staff are rea…

A bit handwavy, but allowing sign-up without a phone number could massively increase bot/spam traffic and ultimately increase hosting costs for Signal.

Just charge $10 to create an account without a phone number and accept Bitcoin. Most people can avoid the $10 by providing a phone number, privacy-conscious people only have to pay $10, it generates revenue, and the $10 puts the spammers out of business because they don't pay $10 once, they pay $10 every time they get banned, which happens multiple times a day.

You could even automate the bans by banning anyone who gets blocked by more than two people they sent messages to, which anybody can avoid by not sending messages to people who would block them, and if it happens to someone innocent, it's still only another $10 to reactivate your account.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#186

Post by atlasunshrugged » Thu, Nov 16, 2023, 5:23 PM UTC

notachatbot123 wrote: post #127

flower-giraffe wrote: post #92

Did I read that right $19m people cost for 50 people.

It's crazy, 400,000k per person. It would feel like nothing but an unfair waste of my "cheap-country" money to fuel "overpriced-county" with a donation.

But that's not salary, that's the total cost per employee. So if you factor in ~40% cost for healthcare, pension, perks, and various taxes, then the average salary is closer to $240,000 which will still a bit high, is probably less than market for the average engineer working at the company.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#187

Post by FalconSensei » Thu, Nov 16, 2023, 5:24 PM UTC

just_boost_it wrote: post #129

aquova wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really buy this argument. Is signing up with a phone number really that much easier for the average user than using a username/email account? Billions of people seemed to have no problems making a Facebook or Google account.

With WhatsApp, your phone number allowed you to see everyone in your contacts that you could message on there, so you could see everyone straight away. Without that, you'd have to bring your friends along and have them sign up as well, then give you their username so you can connect.

Even Instagram allows you to search your contacts. If they have their number set in their profiles, it'll find a match

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#188

Post by superfrank » Thu, Nov 16, 2023, 5:24 PM UTC

vore wrote: post #123

exabrial wrote: post #51

Some of these things raise an eyebrow and I'd like them further broken down (but in the mean time, I'm still donating): * $19 million for 50 staff - That's $338k/head on average. At face value for a nonprofit, I'd like these costs broke down as this seems excessive. There is far cheaper IT labor available outside SV. * 20 petabytes per year of bandwidth, or 20 million gigabytes, to enable voice and video calling alon…

- That's $338k/head on average. At face value for a nonprofit, I'd like these costs broke down as this seems excessive. There is far cheaper IT labor available outside SV. You get what you pay for, though. $338k/year seems like a reasonable salary for people working on something as privacy critical as Signal – just because you're working for a nonprofit doesn't mean you have to work for less competitive wages.

IIRC, employees cost the business ~150% of their salary. That means we're looking at more like a $220k/yr salary on average. For a bay area company, that seems completely reasonable.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#189

Post by brewdad » Thu, Nov 16, 2023, 5:24 PM UTC

aquova wrote: post #128

Retric wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s the building a social network part that’s frictionless not creating user name process that’s frictionless.

The lack of a social network is why I settled on Signal. Before using Signal I tried Telegram, which requires a phone number and if they recognize your number in any of their user's contact list (which many people seem happy to allow access to), they'll send them a notification telling them their contact has joined. I got a nasty message within 10 minutes of making an account from a woman accusing me of pretending to…

Signal does the same thing. Or maybe it used to but they changed it. I have a bunch of notifications of "so and so is on Signal" from when I joined years ago.

Can't say I've ever gotten any psycho responses from it though.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#190

Post by bloggie » Thu, Nov 16, 2023, 5:24 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.

Funny, because that's the reason I can't use Signal - I don't have a phone number.