Signal Suddenly Issues Stunning New Strike At Facebook
Signal has been a nightmare for Facebook this year. The messenger attracted millions of new users after the backlash against WhatsApp sharing data with its parent and its stark iOS privacy label. Now Signal has suddenly come after Facebook itself, with a brilliant new campaign intended to highlight its “intolerable” data harvesting. If you use Facebook, if Facebook has your data, this should be a shocking reality check. Signal is having a brilliant 2021. Growth is accelerating as the network effect has built on WhatsApp’s exodus, catapulting the once niche player into the majors. Somewhat ironically, just as WhatsApp played the outsider to overtake the mobile networks and SMS nearly a decade ago, so Signal now has WhatApp firmly in its sights. There are plenty of ironies here—how about the fact that Signal is part-backed by WhatsApp founder Brian Acton, or that WhatsApp’s fabled end-to-end encryption is actually Signal’s own protocol. But, ultimately, this is a battle of philosophies. Signal doesn’t collect your data—any of your data. And WhatsApp collects way too much. Now Signal has shifted its attention from WhatsApp to its parent, Facebook. Building on its viral messaging of recent weeks, including the amusing revelation that Mark Zuckerberg was himself a Signal user, the messenger has now gone a step further. Signal has lifted the veil on Facebook’s frightening surveillance machine in a blogpost, published today. “Dimly concealed within complex, opaquely-rendered systems,” Signal says, this would be “intolerable if translated into comprehensible real world analogs, but it endures because it is invisible.”Signal can’t place targeted ads to build on its traffic—because it can’t segment its audience, it holds no data, remember. So, it doesn't know whether to target young professional men in Sacramento or female students in New York. But if it did, if it had that data, then it could use Facebook to hone the message and the audience. Welcome to the shadowy world of targeted digital advertising. What Signal does know, though, is that its users are privacy-minded, likely aware of the risks in their data being harvested and shared by Facebook and others, in the power of the tools that Facebook has to exploit our data as its own product.“We wanted to use those same tools,” Signal says, “to directly highlight how most technology works. We wanted to buy some Instagram ads.”Signal selected some user characteristics to explicitly share in its proposed ads. “We created a targeted ad designed to show you the personal data that Facebook collects about you and sells access to. The ad would simply display some of the information collected about the viewer.”It would have been stark and effective, thought-provoking. And it would have sent shivers down the spines of millions of Facebook users. The stark realisation that the reason you receive the ads you do is not guesswork—your strings are being pulled. But “Facebook was not into that idea.” Signal says.
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Article Link: https://www.forbes.com/sites/zakdoffm...
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