So I've been using Signal for going on ten years. I don't remember why I started poking around with it; having a job that basically pays you to surf the internet for 50 hours a week masks a lot of origin stories. Either way, when I signed up I had basically one conact that came up "so and so is on Signal!" He messaged me on the app saying "what the hell are you doing here" to which I said "poking around, what the hell are you doing here" to which I got an amusing story about how "Ed" insisted that every piece of production communication related to the movie needed to be on Signal, which was a real pain in the ass considering it couldn't even send MMS at the time. According to "Ed" Signal was the only thing the NSA hadn't cracked.

Granted, that was ten years ago.

I also need a messaging platform that is (A) HIPAA-compliant (B) familiar to everyone who uses it (C) in-network for all the people we need to communicate with which was absolutely WhatsApp. Which, of course, has had Facebook baggage for longer than Signal has existed. Signal, by the way, exists in large part because Brian Acton, WhatsApp founder was extremely ooked out by what Facebook was doing to Whatsapp so he took his billions and built a competitor. So anyway we tiger-teamed WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, and iOS (which, incidentally, the WSJ did years later and determined that:

- Telegram is owned by a Russian oligarch, but has cool stickers

- Signal is about as meme-unfriendly as David Brooks

- WhatsApp has the greatest penetration by far and is also owned by Facebook

- iOS is rock-fucking-solid but also based on a proprietary ad-hoc glueball entirely beholden to Apple's moods

So. Wanna start a lynch mob? WhatsApp. Wanna help out Putin? Telegram. Wanna be unable to talk to anyone on Android? iMessage. Wanna be about as boring as Windows 3.11? Signal.