[imagesource: here]

When you’re battling a police state, you’ll need to keep certain things under wraps, especially when it comes to organised dissent.

Peaceful protesters across America have been routinely brutalised by police, the irony of which hasn’t gone unnoticed.

Technology has made it easier than ever to organise mass action. It has also made it easier for the higher-ups to access our personal information.

Click the ‘Off-Facebook Activity’ button next time you’re on Facebook. It shows how Facebook and sister apps Instagram and Messenger don’t need a microphone to target you with those eerily specific ads and posts.

This accounts for why protesters are turning to the encrypted messaging app Signal to protect their conversations.

Over to Mashable:

The app, which is free, open source, and run by a nonprofit, has seen huge spikes in downloads over the course of the past week.

Apptopia, a service that monitors app downloads, told Mashable on Monday that Signal was downloaded 37,000 times this past weekend — a record. What’s more, according to Recode, data from both App Annie and Apptopia show the spike in downloads didn’t slow down.

Signal has reportedly been downloaded 121,000 times in the US alone, according to Apptopia, since May 25.

The app was launched way back in 2014, so it’s sudden surge in popularity was unexpected.

That is, until you know more about it:

As these things often go, it’s likely several things coming to head at once. First of all, Signal is end-to-end encrypted. That means that no one, other than the sender and the intended recipient, can read the messages sent over the platform.

As privacy scandals dominate the news, especially involving Facebook, people are surely looking for a messaging app that they can trust. Signal is that app.

Now, however, it’s not just shady tech companies that we have to be worried about. There are growing fears in America that the police will access private messaging apps like WhatsApp. Signal has a way of dealing with that, too:

In 2016, Signal “received a subpoena from the Eastern District of Virginia” requiring it to hand over data on two users of the app. The only information Signal was able to “produce in response to a request like this is the date and time a user registered with Signal and the last date of a user’s connectivity to the Signal service.”

In other words, Signal doesn’t keep data on its users — so it had nothing to turn over.

The disappearing messages feature on Signal also means that if you are forced to hand over or open your phone by police, they’ll only be able to see your most recent messages.

The fact that something like this is necessary in 2020, speaks to what a dumpster fire of a year we’re having.

What a time to be alive.

You can download the Signal app here.

[source:mashable]