Neeraj Agrawal, spokesman for a cryptocurrency think tank, typically uses the Signal encrypted messaging app to chat with colleagues and colleagues concerned about privacy. So he was surprised on Monday when the app alerted him to two new users: mom and dad.
“Signal still had a subversive glow,” said Agrawal, 32. “Now my parents are working on it.”
On Telegram, another encrypted messaging app, Gavin McInnes, founder of the far-right group Proud Boys, had just announced his return. “Man, I haven’t posted here in a while,” he wrote on Sunday. “I will post regularly.”
And on Twitter, Elon Musk, the billionaire businessman, also weighed in last week with a two-word endorsement: “Use Signal”.
Over the past week, tens of millions of people have downloaded Signal and Telegram, making them the two most popular apps in the world. The signal allows messages to be sent with “end-to-end encryption”, which means that no one, except the sender and recipient, can read their content. Telegram offers some encrypted messaging options, but is very popular for its group chat rooms, where people can discuss a variety of subjects.
Its sudden jump in popularity was driven by a series of events last week that fueled growing anxiety about some of the big tech companies and their communication apps, like Facebook-owned WhatsApp. Technology companies, including Facebook and Twitter, removed thousands of far-right accounts – including President Trump’s – after the Capitol invasion. Amazon, Apple and Google also cut support for Parler, a social network popular with Trump fans. In response, conservatives sought new applications where they could communicate.
At the same time, privacy concerns have increased on WhatsApp, which last week reminded users in a pop-up notification that it shares some of its data with its parent company. The notification triggered a wave of anxiety, fueled by viral chain messages that falsely claimed that Facebook could read WhatsApp messages.
The result was a massive migration that, if it lasts, could weaken the power of Facebook and other big tech companies. On Tuesday, Telegram said it added more than 25 million users in the previous three days, reaching more than 500 million users. Signal added about 1.3 million users on Monday alone, after an average of just 50,000 downloads a day last year, according to estimates by Apptopia, an application data company.
“We had peak downloads before,” said Pavel Durov, chief executive of Telegram, in a message on the app on Tuesday. “But this time is different.”
Carl Woog, a spokesman for WhatsApp, said that users’ privacy settings have not changed and that rumors about what data is shared are largely unfounded.
“What doesn’t change is that private messages to friends and family, including group chats, will be protected by end-to-end encryption so that we can’t see them,” he said.
The rise of Telegram and Signal can ignite the debate over cryptography, which helps to protect the privacy of people’s digital communications, but can prevent authorities from investigating crimes because conversations are hidden.
Any move to apps by far-right groups in particular has worried US officials, some of whom are trying to track the planning of what could become a violent demonstration during or before President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s inauguration in next week .
“The proliferation of encrypted platforms, where the police cannot even monitor rhetoric, allows groups with bad intentions to plan behind the curtain,” said Louis Grever, head of the State Criminal Investigation Agencies Association.
Capitol Riot Fallout
Telegram is particularly popular with the extreme right because it mimics social media. So after Facebook and Twitter limited Trump on their services last week and other companies started getting support from Parler, far-right groups in Parler and other marginal social networks posted links to new Telegram channels and asked people to join them.
In the four hours after Parler went offline on Monday, a group of Proud Boys on Telegram gained more than 4,000 new followers.
“Don’t trust big technology,” said a message from a group of Proud Boys in Parler. “We need to find safer spaces.”
At Signal, a Florida-based militia group said on Monday that it was organizing its chats into small groups, city by city, limited to a few dozen people each, according to messages seen by The New York Times. They warned each other not to let in anyone they didn’t know personally, to prevent police from spying on their chats.
The flood of users of Telegram, based in Dubai, and Signal, based in Silicon Valley, goes far beyond the American extreme right. Durov said 94% of Telegram’s 25 million new users came from Asia, Europe, Latin America, the Middle East and North Africa. Apptopia data showed that while the United States was the number 1 source of new Signal users, downloads of both applications have increased in India, Indonesia, Mexico, Brazil and elsewhere.
Fears about WhatsApp privacy policies have boosted Telegram and Signal’s popularity. Although there has been no significant change in the way WhatsApp handles user data, people immediately interpreted the app’s privacy notification last week as meaning that it was infiltrating all kinds of personal information – like records of personal chat and voice calls – and sharing that data with companies.
WhatsApp quickly said that people were mistaken and that they couldn’t see anything inside encrypted chats and calls. But it was too late.
“The whole world now seems to understand that Facebook is not creating applications for them, Facebook is developing applications for their data,” said Moxie Marlinspike, founder and chief executive of Signal. “It took that little catalyst to push everyone to the limit of making a change.”
The fervor was so great that on Tuesday, Moses Tsali, a Los Angeles rapper, released a music video for his song, “Hit Me On Signal”. And Musk’s endorsement of Signal last week caused the shares of Signal Advance Inc., a small medical device manufacturer, to rise from a market value of about $ 50 million to more than $ 3 billion. (The company is not related to the messaging app.)
Some world leaders have also asked people to join them on the apps. On Sunday, Twitter of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, from Mexico, spoke about his new group on Telegram. As of Wednesday, it had almost 100,000 members.
Eli Sapir, chief executive of Apptopia, said that while people’s concerns about Facebook data collection are just, WhatsApp actually uses more secure encryption than Telegram. “It’s like going from something high in sugar to corn syrup,” he said, adding that Signal was the safest of the three.
Meyi Alabi, 18, a student in Ibadan, Nigeria, said she was surprised this week when her mother invited her to join Signal. His mother had downloaded the app at the insistence of a friend worried about WhatsApp.
“I was in shock because she took it before me,” she said. “We used to tell our parents about the new apps. Now, suddenly, we are being informed. “
Agrawal, the cryptocurrency, said his parents have long been participating in various WhatsApp chat groups with college friends and relatives in India. He said he was told that he joined Signal to follow many of the chats that were taking place there, because some of the participants were concerned about the new WhatsApp policy.
He said he knew the dangers of WhatsApp’s policy were exaggerated, but that a large part of the public does not understand how their data is being treated.
“They hear these important things – data sharing, Facebook, privacy,” said Agrawal, “and that’s enough for them to say, I need to get out of this.”