Desiree Battjes
from Debatt
Small Resistance to Big Tech – Switching to Signal
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Column – Switching from WhatsApp to Signal is a thing. Last week I got the final push from a friend. She – just to the left of the political center – told me that her colleagues – at a public institution – had switched. Because I – just to the right of the political center – am fed up with the bleating of the American tech bros and have dataset  been growing data anxiety in me for some time, I decided to switch too. This small act of resistance felt a bit activist and a bit obscure.

Yet Signal has consistently topped the lists of most downloaded apps in the Netherlands since the turn of the year. And although Signal does not communicate user numbers, we know that in 2024 there were already 70 million active users per month worldwide. That number will be many more by now.

Even the German army

I also discovered that entire organizations use Signal as an instant messaging channel. Since 2020, the European Commission has advised its staff to use Signal for confidential communication. In the same year, the German army switched to Signal as an alternative to WhatsApp. And Mozilla – the company be numbers behind the web browser Firefox – actively promotes the app and uses it for internal communication. In the Netherlands, there are undoubtedly also organizations that have switched or are considering doing so.

So far, so good . Super nice. Switching is a nice middle finger to Zuckerberg and it is nice that sandy knight regional hr director your data is no longer used for God-knows-what.

Also read: From WhatsApp to Signal: why is the Netherlands switching en masse?
But.

Are we willing to pay?

Keeping a globally used app up and running and developing it further costs quite a few euros (or dollars, I want to avoid that). Meta makes WhatsApp available for free, because it collects data from 2 billion users with it. A goldmine. Signal now has millions of users and does nothing with their data.