Based on a survey given last week, the preferred messaging app for our students is iMessage by Apple. The runner-up is Samsung Messages, followed by Google Messages. They’re all considered to be relatively secure. iMessage is even encrypted. However, there’s one app out there that is even more secure than all these: Signal, by Open Whisper Systems. It is so secure, in fact, that fugitive Edward Snowden endorsed it.

Signal is constantly striving to update its technology to use as little metadata (in this case, metadata is data associated with the text message, such as date/time/sender/recipient) as possible. A recent update came out called “Sealed Sender,” which means, if Bob sent you a message, the computer system would only know who it was to be delivered to, but wouldn’t know that Bob sent it. (See https://signal.org/blog/sealed-sender/ for more info.)

The following features are available if the person you are messaging has Signal as well: Your messages are end-to-end encrypted, and Signal “can’t read your messages or see your calls, and no one else can either.” Disappearing messages are also an option.

You’ll often hear that no software is really free – the creators of the software have to make money somehow, whether that is ads, data mining, or in-app purchases. Signal does none of these things because it is supported by grants and donations. Signal “does not sell, rent or monetize your personal data or content in any way – ever.” In addition, Signal is open-source, which means you can check the code yourself to see what it is doing.

I read through Signal’s Privacy Policy and Terms and I couldn’t find anything worth worrying about. The only significant thing I found was in the Privacy Policy: that Signal can share your data “to meet any applicable law, regulation, legal process or enforceable governmental request.” However, upon further consideration, I realized Signal does not have access to your messages, therefore, Signal would hardly have anything to share, especially since the new update removes the sender info from the metadata.

Why should we care how secure our messaging apps are if we have nothing to hide? In the United States, we need to protect our privacy. If we continually allow companies to have our information, privacy may disappear. HG.org realizes this. “Indeed, the ‘right’ [to privacy] has already been so greatly modified that it may soon be difficult to consider it a right at all.” Let’s take a step towards protecting that by not allowing companies to have access to our personal information.

You can download Signal for free on the Google Play Store or the App Store.