Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

>>mikece+(OP)
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 alone, which comes to $1.7 million a year

  - I'd drop these features if possible, or give them to donors.

* Storage: $1.3m, Servers: $2.9m

  - I was actually expecting this to be far higher

  - Long term storage should probably be donor-only

  - Servers could likely be optimized by going hybrid cloud with colocation and owning own hardware, but again, was surprised how "little" they're spending on this.

* Sms registration fees: $6m

  - Stop contributing and supporting the "Your phone number is your identity" problem.

  - Move towards helping educating society and establishing a set of encryption keys as their long term identity

It's easy to criticize from the bleachers. Still thankful for the app and I'll continue to donate.

>>exabri+E9
They need to dump sms entirely. Use on device private keys. If users mess it up, it’s on them. People need to get educated about how to manage private keys.

>>asylte+Yb
As someone technically savvy, I don't trust myself to manage my own private keys sufficiently for a service that's the point of contact for all my friends and family. I think it's a much taller order for someone without the technical knowhow – remember that Signal's audience includes very non-technical people who don't have time to learn the technical ins and outs but absolutely require its utility, like journalists and dissidents.

zlacker