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Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

signal.org

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Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#71

Post by charcircuit »

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…

Phone verification does have value in adopting the network effects of phone numbers and integrity by making it harder to mass create accounts.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#72

Post by slaw »

supriyo-biswas wrote: post #25
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.

> we can rent server infrastructure from a variety of providers like Amazon AWS, Google Compute Engine, Microsoft Azure Moving off cloud services to lower-cost provider like Hetzner, Vultr and DigitalOcean might provide a lot of cost savings. I also imagine they're using managed SMS services from one of these clouds, and moving off them to a combination of local SMS gateways in each country can also further reduce co…

Any idea what prevents Signal from using cheaper alternatives?

Edit: I meant moving off cloud to Hetzner, Vultr, DigitalOcean.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#73

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

tapoxi wrote: post #22
yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're already working on it: https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/software/signal-tests-... Not whether that's a good idea is more debatable; you're not wrong about discoverability.

Those are in addition to the phone number, but it will still require a phone number under the hood.

In the short term it will, and quite possibly in a long-term also, but if you were going to fully make phone numbers optional, I'm pretty sure this is the first step you would take. At the very least it sure looks like they're starting to build the possibility.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#74

Post by freeqaz »

yetanotherloss wrote: post #42

Who is the active user base for signal these days? Everyone I knew who was using it dropped off after the SMS debacle, which was a shame. Edit: Wow some weird haters on HN today. I was honestly curious as an active signal user that was no longer able to use it to message people in North America and had never seen anyone using it in East Asia. Apparently this makes some other signal users very angry.

I've converted all of my friends and family to using it. It's the "social media" for my world now. I'm probably an outlier for that, but it makes me happy!

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#75

Post by j45 »

java-man wrote: post #4
bilal4hmed wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

is there any way they can reduce that cost?

Yeah, decouple Signal user identity from the phone number.

Phone numbers are the easiest login for people, especially in a world where not everyone has an email address.

I know this will invite comments about usernames. I would like usernames a lot too.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#76

Post by simcop2387 »

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…

One thing I question with that is that if you gave features to donors only, wouldn't that mean that signal now needs to track users in ways that aren't privacy preserving? I.e. you'd be able to know if any given user using signal now has given payments to signal. I'm not sure that'd work with what they want to do as an organization.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#77

Post by OfSanguineFire »

yetanotherloss wrote: post #42

Who is the active user base for signal these days? Everyone I knew who was using it dropped off after the SMS debacle, which was a shame. Edit: Wow some weird haters on HN today. I was honestly curious as an active signal user that was no longer able to use it to message people in North America and had never seen anyone using it in East Asia. Apparently this makes some other signal users very angry.

I've been to a lot of meetups in the last year and exchanged contacts with people. As a nerdy idealist running a deGoogled Android with no proprietary software, I always have to tell them that I don’t have WhatsApp, just Signal. Again and again I have heard the reply, “Oh, yeah, I’ve got Signal, I use it to buy drugs.”

So, that’s some of the active user base in my city, but none of those users are very motivated to use Signal with their network of contacts in general. There WhatsApp reigns.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#78

Post by jedberg »

datpiff wrote: post #70
jedberg wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mathed backwards. It's $380K per person fully loaded. Which is pretty inline with decent tech salary these days.

That is their total cost, not the salary paid.

Yes, which is why I said "fully loaded"

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#79

Post by smt88 »

charcircuit wrote: post #71
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…

Phone verification does have value in adopting the network effects of phone numbers and integrity by making it harder to mass create accounts.

Right, it's a way to create a cost barrier without anyone giving Signal a credit card directly.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#80

Post by nvrmnd »

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 sustainable.

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