- Elon Musk’s tweet in May about Signal’s vulnerabilities brought on important fallout for the app.
- Signal’s president, Meredith Whittaker, refuted Musk’s claims, calling them baseless.
In the digital world, few issues are as difficult as dealing with the fallout from a controversial tweet from Elon Musk.
In May, Musk tweeted that the encrypted messaging app Signal had “recognized vulnerabilities.” Signal’s president, Meredith Whittaker, informed Wired she spent “two nights of me not sleeping, simply coping with Twitter stuff.”
Musk had initially backed the app in 2021 with a direct, two-word tweet: “Use Signal.”
“He’s been a fan. So I do not know what modified,” Whittaker mentioned. “What I do know is that, so far as we all know, the declare was fully baseless.” She added that there was no “critical report” backing up Musk’s claims.
Signal is taken into account safer than most messaging apps due to “end-to-end encryption,” which encodes a sender’s message in order that solely the meant receiver’s machine can unlock it. The platform’s code can be open-source, which the corporate mentioned emphasizes its concentrate on privateness. “We work within the open, documenting our pondering and making our code open supply and open to scrutiny—so you do not have to take our phrase for it,” in keeping with a weblog put up from Signal.
Musk’s feedback, nevertheless, got here amid a swirl of criticism concerning the app. Around that point, Pavel Durov, the CEO of rival app Telegram, additionally criticized Signal, saying it was not a safe alternative for personal messaging and that “the US authorities spent $3M to construct Signal’s encryption.”
According to Wired, there are additionally figures within the “hacker scene” suggesting higher, extra “obscure, ultra-secure” messaging platforms.
Whittaker rebuffed these claims, and informed the outlet that “it is very disappointing to me to see that type of discourse.” For those that cannot confirm the validity of claims in opposition to Signal — who, Whittaker mentioned, are 99% of its customers — these sorts of feedback may cause true safety disruptions. “It’s a life-or-death situation.”
