【Action Archives】

Pull out your smartphone and Action Archivesscroll through your list of recently downloaded apps. What do you see — Snapchat, HQ Trivia, or maybe some random face-filtering nonsense? Is Signal in there? If not, you've messed up in a major way.

Despite all the cool games, video editing tools, and shopping-assistant applications released this year, the secure messaging app Signal is the only one that really mattered over the course of 2017. And it wasn't even released this year.

For the uninitiated, Signal is a free and secure messaging application that allows for encrypted texts, phone calls, and video chats between users. That's basically it. Sure, it has a ton of neat features (like disappearing messages), but a big part of what makes it so important is just how simple it is.

If you can use iMessage, you can use Signal. If you can figure out how to send a text message, you can figure out Signal.

And that's the way it should be. With Signal, the private way to communicate is also the easy and free one. No more mucking about with PGP, and no more wondering just who, exactly, is reading your messages.

"There are no ads, no affiliate marketers, no creepy tracking," Whisper Systems explains on its website. "Just open technology for a fast, simple, and secure messaging experience."

This matters. As we put more and more of our lives online, each and every bit of data we willingly submit (and some we don't) is harvested by massive corporations in order to better both track and predict our behavior and target us with advertisements. This is, to say the least, problematic.

By allowing you to have truly private conversations, Signal changes that equation. Why is this so important? This year, perhaps more than ever, we've seen just how asleep at the wheel tech giants are when it comes to nefarious actors using their platforms to sow discord and incite violence. Taking your conversations, and, by extension, valuable data about your so-called social graph off those platforms is one way to fight this.

But that's not all. This year also brought the Trump administration's stated intention to hunt down whistleblowers. Signal makes that job more difficult. Feel like leaking the shady machinations of some corrupt official? Signal can help you do this.

And if the government does come after your communications, Whisper Systems won't have much information to give them. According to the organization, in 2016 it "received a subpoena from the Eastern District of Virginia" requiring it to hand over data on two users. The only information it could "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."

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That's it. No record of who you're messaging with, how frequently you texted, or even ifyou messaged a specific person. Signal doesn't have the information to hand over.

The app gives you the power of private communication, for free, and asks nothing in return. That is an extremely rare bargain these days, and one that should not be overlooked. Still, there is one potential drawback — the person you want to securely talk with has to also have Signal. However, that shouldn't be too much of an issue.

If you feel like leaking sensitive information, most journalists already have it. Want to chat with someone in your life? Simply ask your friends and family to download it — possibly when you see them over the holidays. They've probably tried out a bunch of random apps over the course of the year, so what's one more that they'll actually use?

And, in one fell swoop, you will have helped to protect both your own privacy and that of your loved ones. That's a pretty great deal, and one we should all be seriously considering as we turn the page on this dreadful year in preparation for whatever is to come.

The app is available on both Android and iOS, and even has a desktop version. You should use it.