Hey sorry was on the phone with a friend. And then this took a while to write... So this blog post explains it pretty well I think better than I do but I'll try (not sure if you read it already or not so maybe I'll be more convincing then...). https://medium.com/@mshelton/signal-for-beginners-c6b44f76a1f0

Anyway, it lets you do free (secure) text messaging with anyone in the world that uses Signal (so get your friends to use it too! ;) ) It uses data not sms or phone minutes. Personally I have extremely limited quotas for both so being able to use Wi-Fi is great. You can also make (again, secure) audio calls as well as video chats like you can with FaceTime or Skype! and it has the normal useful features people are used to as well as some they aren't; like private group messages, tons of emojis, password protection to prevent people from reading your messages even if your phone is unlocked, message backups (that are encrypted and password protected too), file and location sharing, and recorded voice messages, etc. All done with encryption in a secure way that helps keep people safe and preserve their privacy as much as possible. It combines a lot of the same features people get with iMessage and FaceTime (but it works on android too so everyone can use it!) and things like Skype or WhatsApp (both of which are less secure and more invasive than Signal, and Signal is completely free...) WhatsApp used to have somewhat similar security features as Signal (it used the same underlying protocol but without being able to verify it wasn't "misbehaving") until Facebook bought them... I recommend not using WhatsApp or Facebook if you can. I know some people really can't or don't want to give Facebook up though. Personally I'm more happy and mentally healthy without it and plenty of others would benefit from doing the same. I haven't used it in years. They're responsible for so many bad things that they'll never take action to stop. They invade your privacy and sell your data without your consent. (well, the TOS probably mentions it but few read or understand that and would they actually, without hesitation or giving it a second thought, consent to it if they did? More and more people are realizing that and moving away or not signing up in the first place) Skype is also invasive; as I understand it Microsoft records and stores all of your calls and does who knows what with them... this is a trend among many if not most for profit services. Honestly, there are an incredible amount of extremely harmful apps/companies/individuals and governments that do everything they can to take advantage of people, collecting data and using it for whatever they want with no oversight or repercussions for misuse or when they're hacked and everyones data is exposed. There are plenty of malicious attackers too that steal identities and empty people's bank accounts and potentially their entire life savings :(

If you're interested in other ways of protecting yourself in a world where so many people are collecting personal data about you without your consent, and oftentimes the people with the data are breached and attackers steal the data and sell it on black markets..., and even without that are still hurting people... ways to protect privacy, increase digital/online safety, and strengthen security are (one of) the things I care a lot about and help people with. And there are many ways to protect yourself and a lot of them are easy to do and don't cost money (and the few paid ones I recommend are affordable and imo the benefits are worth the cost) Technology can be great but it's often abused and the ways in which it moves are so fast and the dangers ever increasing in severity that it's hard enough for security experts to have current knowledge and the ability to combat the dangers; let alone most people.

(one of my friends has had their ex spying on her, hacking her devices and monitoring her conversations... he's doing a good job of ruining her life and causing a great deal of distress. Went so far as framing her and getting her charged with basically the crimes he's doing to her...Anyway, it's some really scary shit).

Anyway, the makers of Signal take privacy and security seriously; they're "one of the good guys". If they were to change their ethics it would completely invalidate all they've worked for. There's more incentive for them to maintain course than to sell out and there's really not a need to anyway. In addition, due to the license, if they ever did such a thing someone else would take over and replace it. The app has been designed from the ground up from day one with the goal to protect users and do as much as possible to ensure that governments, service providers, corporations or attackers can spy on people. It is designed so that attackers can not read or record or store or access messages (and to the extent that an ISP or whatever might be able to intercept traffic the data they collect is worthless and not possible to decrypt) your messages are never read by a computer or otherwise so it's not possible to target people with advertisements or monitor your conversations and it doesn't share your private information with anyone. In fact it goes to great lengths to minimize and encrypt as much meta data as possible. Meta data is extra data that is stored alongside the real data... meta data is common in all sorts of data transfers and many file types have it. Image files can contain extra information about when the picture was taken, what camer was used, what the settings were, may even include the location it was taken! Audio files can store the track number, song name, artist, album, year, etc. as meta data. Internet traffic has to know where it's supposed to go and servers have to be able to pass it on. There are a few protocols that do this in a secure manner but most don't. Because meta data frequently has sensitive information and may not be encrypted it's a common vector of attack to learn something useful about the data even if the contents remain obscure. Encrypting meta data in a way that it can still perform its function can be difficult. Signal does a good job of removing and encrypting the meta data to make it useless to attackers but still perform its purpose. They went to a lot of trouble to make sure that even your contacts aren't known by them nor by anyone else. (I have links that explain how that works if you're curious) Most companies that have access to your contacts misuse that information without informed consent. They use it to advertise, collect and send emails, invite them to signup using your name without your consent learn who's in your social network and sell that information, they know who you talk to and what you talk about. Signal goes to great lengths to make sure your contacts remain secret and only send the messages you instruct it to.

If you're wondering how it is free and has no ads and what's preventing them from going the way of WhatsApp and trying to monetize it, well; A non profit organization exists that takes donations and pays for the server to keep the system and running and make sure there are full-time developers (there's an LLC that the two original developers own that the foundation funds) that can work on it and not starve. Making a ton of profit for investors or share holders isn't a goal as they haven't and (most likely never will) won't take millions of dollars of venture capital from people that are expecting a huge return like a lot of these companies that I've mentioned or alluded to already. VC funding has been the downfall of many promising projects... There's no incentive for them to betray their goals and every reason not to turn evil. Donations, security experts, and organizations that depend on it as well as a large group of volunteers that care about security, and the people that use it help as well as, make sure it succeeds and continues to get better. It is a free libre open source software (FLOSS) project; the source code is free to everyone and will remain so, security experts are able to review and improve the source code ensuring it is safe and does what it is supposed to. There are hundreds of people that volunteer their time and skills to find, report and fix bugs. Anyone can review the code to verify it does what it's supposed to and help improve it.

Keeping your information private is extremely important (to me anyway, and to them) so it's designed to be as secure as possible. The only people that see your conversations are you and the person(s) you message. Messages aren't archived on their servers "in the cloud" unlike many other messaging apps. They're only stored on you and the other persons in the conversation devices. There are security measures in place so that even if the data sent is intercepted (by an ISP, abusive ex with control of your router, a government (not just ours either, foreign governments frequently attempt (and often succeed) to intercept traffic...), your phone company, etc.) the messages are encrypted in a way that no one else can read or decipher them. Many other messaging and social media apps are known to keep conversations forever in a readable format that hackers or anyone with the appropriate credentials (like employees of the company) are able to access. It's known that Facebook has had employees read people's private Facebook Messenger conversations; sometimes for the purpose of stalking people... others for no other reason than because they could and found it amusing... super creepy. Twitter recently found out that the Saudis had 2 employees (that have since been arrested) spying on the private messages of people critical of their government... A country that is known to murder dissidents... sometimes even going so far as killing citizens of/in other countries abroad while outside of SA) The companies that store messages are also susceptible to anyone with (and often without, laws vary by country, corruption exists, legal authorities often break or change the law) a warrant or anyone that has the right amount of money. Not even necessarily a lot of money; phone company employees have been known to illegally share data or do SIM swaps for hackers for as little as $20. With Signal messages exist only on your devices. And once they're deleted they're gone. Some apps only hide deleted messages and keep them in storage where someone can find them. You can even set an option that automatically deletes messages from both people's phones after a set time. Normally deleting a message removes it only from your phone. This automatic deletion is especially important for certain people at high risk; such as journalists who don't want their sources to be compromised, etc. Or would otherwise like to make sure they won't be seen by someone they shouldn't. Maybe someone in an abusive relationship or child with overbearing parents. Many reasons. That may be less useful to you but it's still good to have as an option. I use it sometimes lol.

(If you haven't noticed I take security and privacy very seriously). Anyway, even if all of that isn't of obvious utility or importance to you (IMO everyone should take their privacy/security/safety seriously**) It has a lot of features that make it nice to use with non Sgnal users too (on android, iOS doesn't allow alternative SMS apps); I use it as my regular SMS app it's better than the ones that come with most androids. but it's better if they use it too. So invite everyone you can :D Which is why I advocate for it so much. One thing I use all of the time is I can link it to my computer or iPad and message people from there rather than type on the phone. I even got my parents to use it and they love it. There are so many reasons (many of which are really important reasons) to use it and no reason not to.

**It's frustrating to me how many people don't care about their privacy, personal information, safety and control over who they give consent to invade their personal lives as well as the people they communicate with! There are normally at least two sides to a conversation. So many don't understand how important digital privacy and security are. But they lock their doors... and this (security and privacy and control of your data) is far more important and effective than locking your door. Locks are easy to bypass but you should still use them. Better locks and stronger doors are good. Using a safe is even better at protecting sensitive documents. Signal (and encryption in general) is more like a safe. Used correctly it can be even more secure than a real safe. Anyway for some reason it's often quite difficult to get people to care. I don't get it. It's easy. It's effective. It makes sense. Even people who really do need to protect themselves because they are at higher risk are frequently hard to get to realize the importance... you might be surprised at how hard it is to get people to do even the simplest things to protect themselves or understand why (and it protects others too!) I know I don't understand it. Especially perplexing when it is so easy to do and has so few downsides. The biggest hurdle to using Signal is getting people to use it lol. Eventually enough people will that it's easier because lots of their friends use it. I believe that to be true or at least I hope so anyway. Many security tools are hard to use but Signal is incredibly easy; it's as easy as any other messaging app and has a lot of nice features on top of the ways it protects you. And it works securely by default and has more advanced options that you can enable like blocking screenshots and adding passcode or fingerprint lock to open and you can enable a setting to keep someone else from stealing your number. Some apps that can encrypt conversations do not do so by default. I probably spend more hours talking about the importance and benefits and reasons to use Signal (and other apps to protect themselves online) ... basically educating people about the dangers in the world and ways to be safer than anything else I talk about...lol :(

For some people Signal is literally a life saving app. It can help protect children with abusive parents/caretakers from being spied on. It allows vulnerable people to be in contact with their support groups even in a situation where they're powerless. Imagine a young adult/teenager that's going through puberty starting to understand their sexuality or make sense of their gender or has parents/relatives that are abusing them in horrible ways...and they try to control and monitor everything the child says and who they talk to. Suppose the child is coming to terms with being gay or trans and their family would disown them, maybe even hurt them, if they knew. Or an abusive partner that someone is trying to escape from. And unfortunately all of this is incredibly common. And even more unfortunately there are plenty of companies out there that are trying to make a profit off of apps and services that monitor and control everything a person does on their phone or computer. Earlier (@@ it is actually later in the document right now...) I described a lot of the evil invasive things countries do but the fact is a lot of companies are doing the exact same things. Sometimes worse things as they can get more direct access to information more easily when the users give it to them. They're not nearly as well regulated either, sure governments break laws sometimes too but in many cases they're actually held accountable whereas corporations are not. Companies are intentionally writing spyware and selling it under the guise of security and safety but it's actually abusive. They do everything they can to collect as much information as possible, keep records of who the victims talk to, what they say, what websites they visit, capture passwords. Alll of this private, sensitive, potentially dangerous information is stored permanently and analyzed. It's then provided to whoever is willing to pay for it or any attacker that manages to get access. Or any government that demands it. Occasionally the data is stored encrypted so it is somewhat better protected but not always and rarely completely invulnerable. There's so much damaging information of so many people that's just one (incredibly common) data breach away from being exposed. These kinds of databases are high priority targets. And more often than not even the intended purpose of the apps is used maliciously. The people installing and paying for the services/apps will use them to hurt and abuse children, relatives, partners, etc. In one way or another. Imagine if your parents knew everything you ever said to your friends growing up, every website you went to, every message you sent on msn messenger or Yahoo etc., read every journal entry you wrote. I know I'd be mortified. Just the act of doing that is abusivr and permanently damages kids... and often the information is used to hurt them even more. Not only that but it conditions them to think it's ok and normal to be constantly under surveillance and for everything they say or do to not have any semblance of privacy and have zero control over who has consent to know any and every detail about their lives. It's not normal and it's not ok! 1984 was meant to be a warning not a guide....

@@Nowadays almost everyone in this country and really most of the world (the parts I'm familiar with at least) is living under multiple independent (but often interconnected) systems of mass surveillance. By their own countries as well as others. Corporations control a lot of the systems which allows the systems and data to be utilized by whoever is willing to pay, able to breach, or legal authority with the means to force, entice with military contract funds, or otherwise convince into an agreement. It is incredibly difficult to live in society in a way that does not make a person vulnerable. Though there are things that can be done to help mitigate and protect your privacy and private information and take back some control of your rights that are under constant attack. Especially, though not at all limited, anyone with a phone, computer. Anyone with a smart; tv, thermostat, digital (home) assistant, fitness watch, doorbell, baby camera/monitor. Basically owns any internet connected (IoT) or online capable device, everyone with a social media account, as well as those without... and even if you somehow manage to avoid all of those things... do you have a credit card or bank account..., an address, a car, health insurance a SSN or visit a doctor, ER or therapist? That's only a small subset of a few of the more common and well known systems that most people are likely to encounter regularly and may be familiar with. There are already places where merely going outside without your face covered will result in being recorded by CCTVs which facilitate systems to use facial recognition software that can identify and track everyone at all times (even more scary is that even with a covered face the way someone walks is enough to uniquely identify a person and some systems are already able to). The government records everywhere people go, who they talk to, what they say on the phone, whether they make disparaging remarks towards the state, or discuss unfavorable and forbidden topics that are critical of the government. They do as much as they can to track every website people visit (and there are restrictions placed on what is even accessible to begin with), what they say on social media or to friends on the state approved messaging apps, they know where people shop, what they buy, and how much they spend and go so far as control who is allowed to travel or work or rent cars or apartments. Expressing unwelcome opinions of leaders or otherwise engaging in unapproved behaviors the government disapproves of may be met with severe punishments; up to and including imprisonment and/or death. To be clear these are not punishments for what most people agree are morally wrong and criminal acts; wrongs like stealing, assault, animal/domestic/elder/child abuse, rape, murder, etc. What I mean are such heinous "crimes" like expressing disapproval of the government or the dominant political party or its leaders, practicing the wrong religion, having ancestors or being of the wrong nationality, for being in love with and wanting to marry someone that doesn't conform to their expectations of sex or gender; for protesting for the right to drive, to not be forced to marry someone against your will, for wanting the right to choose what clothes you wear, to be allowed to go out in public by yourself or with whoever you want, to have as many or as few offspring as you desire. Crimes like reporting the truth and facts about events that show the government in a negative way because the horrible and atrocious actions they are perpetrating rightfully shows how morally bankrupt and monstrous they are. The unacceptable crime of exposing to the world the acts of human rights violations, war crimes, and genocide of indigenous (not exclusively, either!) people and other disinenfranched groups and minorities that the government has perpetrated and will continue to. Sometimes all it takes is to be related to or know someone that is on the list and you're added too.

Governments, both foreign and domestic, are extremely well equipped to engage in wide spread surveillance operations; they posess a massive amount of resources and power which gives them the ability to control, buy, coerce or otherwise influence individuals as well as corporations to fulfill their wishes. They're also in a position to issue severe consequences to whoever they determine should receive it. They have the ability and authority to issue severe consequences based on what they collect. They might be the most well known surveillance state to people (they are, afterall, officially the state). In addition to the state there are many more networks which are controlled by corporations, and an increasing amount of private individuals do so on a much smaller scale as mentioned above. The individuals that do it are possibly the more dangerous parties to many. In many cases the surveillance is entered into voluntarily, but not always knowingly. It is common to do so without understanding the extent or consequences of the agreement and there may be significant penalties or dissencentives to refuse. Many times alternatives aren't practical if they exist as all. Too many people depend on malicious online social networks. Most of the time there is no choice, it is done without our consent and against our will often without our knowledge and without the ability to withdraw our participation. All (most) of those like buttons you see on websites for Facebook, Twitter, etc. Are tracking you. If you have an account it is linked to your profile. If you don't have an account it still is linked to a shadow profile that belongs to you; if you sign up in the future they already have data collected. They may even know who you are if they have enough information.

Almost always what is taken from us is rarely for our own good. When the exchange does provide benefits the exchange is rarely fair. More information is taken than is required and what happens with it afterwards is beyond our control and may very well be used in a way that is against our best interests; and may be used now or in the future. When large amounts of money, executives investors and stock holders, are involved and power and influence are at stake, decisions favor improving profits over all else. When what makes more money and what is good for the users, let alone the rest of the world or the people it effects, are in conflict, greed almost always wins. Rarely are corporations serving our best interests over their investors; occasionally the two goals align and what is good for the bottom line is good for the world. Occasionally. Frequently what we give up is quite dangerous to have out there just waiting for someone to use it against us. And lest we forget how powerful and invasive modern governments are and how much they are willing to do even against their own citizens. The lengths they will go to control and monitor and store everything they possibly can about their own citizens, most often illegally at that. Governments are not only incredibly capable of implementing mass surveillance but also at influencing and controling the ones owned by corporations. And they are incredibly eager for the additional power having that data brings them... and they make (and often break and change) the rules of what they're allowed to do. Not only do they have the means to collect and control so much information that is potentially damaging but a benevolent government is rare; the chance of them using the information they gather for nefarious purposes far outweighs the chance it will be used for good. It's of high risk. Even to people that do nothing wrong. Anything the state can get away with doing to any individual person it can do it to any and all persons. You may be a citizen with legal rights but that won't stop them from claiming you are not. Of course, even if they are not actively, obviously and excessively abusing their powers against citizens today that does not mean they won't tomorrow. Let's not pretend that the only people that need to worry are people that are actually doing anything wrong.

The state decides what is illegal, they can change and suspend and break laws at any time, they can make false claims with more authority that will be believed over the truth, and many things they would like to make illegal are not even wrong, morally or otherwise. History is chalked full of atrocities committed by governments on their own people. Many of which are quite recently, even by our own; we've been conditioned and taught our whole lives to accept or ignore or rationalize so many of them... and many are not widely acknowledged or known about. I don't mean conspiracy theories either but rather known parts of history that aren't commonly taught in schools or glossed over quickly if they are and are heavily biased or make attempts to justify them as necessary. History is written by the victors... usually in a way that glorifies and favors them in spite of how horrible the truth may be.

The state is in an excellent position to abuse their power without repercussion and will do so readily. Signal and other apps with similar goals are necessary to the people living in an oppressive surveillance state. Or really any state. They might be good today, what about tomorrow? These tools are important for everyone, including all regular people, but especially to journalists, political dissidents, protesters and organizers, and people in targeted groups (like what's happening in China, Bolivia, Hong Kong, Ukraine, Russia, Egypt, etc. Innocent people are being killed and arrested every day for being the wrong race, sexuality, religion, gender, expressing dislike of their government ...) to be able to communicate safely without a government intercepting their messages is of utmost importance... for many it's literally a matter of life or death. Sooo anyway... while that might not effect you personally, the more people that use Signal the more effective it is at protecting the people that depend on it to live without persecution. Any one person individually might not be doing a lot to help in saving peoples lives but as a group we are strong! And well there are tons of other more convincing reasons lol but it's good karma and nice to be a part of if even only a small part.

I guess the best reason of all though is it's the best way to communicate with me (and you likely know other people that use it too and if not we can convert them) and well I think that's a pretty good, good enough, reason at least ;D I'm awesome lol... Or at least pretty ok ;)