The CEO of the privacy-focused messaging app 'Signal', Moxie Marlinspike has decided to step down from his position as the CEO of Signal. He will be succeeded by WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton, who is also the executive chairman of the Signal Foundation, the foundation behind Signal, as the interim CEO.
Acton is the co-founder of the popular messaging app WhatsApp. He was the one who founded the app in 2009. He left the company in 2014 over disagreements with Facebook (now Meta) regarding privacy and data usage issues.
Acton, being a strong advocate of Free and open-source software and user-privacy, founded Signal Foundation along with Moxie Marlinspike. Together they started the Signal app which soon gained a lot of popularity due some highly controversial descisions taken by Meta regarding the privacy policy of WhatsApp.
People from all over the world soon began to loose trust on WhatsApp. They began to look for various different privacy-respecting platforms for day-to-day use. This led to a massive surge in the number of users of apps like Telegram and Signal. Signal specially had a hard time accomodating all those people as its servers were not equipped to handle that kind of traffic.
Moxie Marlinspike said that he would be remaining as a board member and would be 'scouting' for a permanant CEO. He said it in his blog that the new year is a very good time to replace himself as the CEO of signal.
Both Marlinspike and Acton are very vocal regarding the privacy of users, which shows not only in their words but in their acts too. They supported many movements like #DeleteFacebook when the Cambridge Analytica incident occured. Acton himself, at a Wired Summit, said,"If you want to be on Facebook, and you want to have ads thrust in front of you, go to town."
We all sincerly hope that this is a step in the right direction as we are strictly against centralised and non-privacy focused messaging platforms. We believe that privacy is the right of every individual and we hope that signal progresses in the right direction to make messaging more secure and private!
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