Moxie Marilyn Spike, founder and CEO of Signal, could not have anticipated the events of the past year that contributed greatly to the app's massive growth in popularity.

The encrypted messaging application "Signal" is famous for its commitment to privacy, as it does not collect or sell any user data, and all communications are end-to-end encrypted, which means that no one - including the application itself - can read messages on the service.

App downloads increased several times in the past 12 months, as a result of the Coronavirus imposing more online interactions, in addition to the wave of "black lives matter" protests in the summer, and now in an atmosphere of mass migration of users from WhatsApp, owned by Facebook. ).

In an interview with Insider, Marilyn Spike described his vision for the company as well as what he saw as growing threats to privacy.

Here are some highlights from that interview.

What attracts people to the app, and how does it adapt to receive new users, especially those who are not familiar with technology?

The ethos of the project is to make private communication simple, to make the way the technology works in fact compatible with what people want when they use the technology.

When someone sends a message to their friend, they want to send it to their friend, not to a group of advertisers, or to hackers, or to big tech companies either.

People are always upset when they discover that this is not the case, that the way things appear is not real, and there are things that they do not know.

The Signal project is an attempt to make technology natural, the way people expect things to do.

We have witnessed constant pressure over the years from governments to ban "end-to-end" encryption.

Do you think potential government actions could pose a privacy threat?

The government of the United States is not a monolithic entity, and there are different competing interests within any world government.

On the one hand, there are people who are pushing to end the encryption, but on the other hand, there are people within the US government at the highest levels who use Signal to protect their private communications.

For national security reasons, Signal is used in the US Senate, White House, and Department of Homeland Security.

So there is an inherent paradox, as trying to undermine the security of cryptography would also undermine the national security interests of the government.

Additionally, a lot of people who advocate weakening encryption don't seem to understand the full picture.

There are two ways to think about security: the first is computer security, which is an idea based on the idea that we will somehow make secure computers, and this is a project that failed 30 years ago, so if you have a computer somewhere with some data, this data will be compromised.

The other way to think about security is information security, so even if someone breaks into a computer, they won't find information because it is encrypted.

This is the only thing that has actually worked in the past 30 years, and those trying to undermine the only thing that worked in the field of computer security do not fully understand that, but most insiders know that there is no longer a discussion in this area, it is not a controversial topic.

Marilyn Spike believes that privacy has become more important to people with much of their lives shifting to the Internet (networking sites)

Consumers seem to care more about privacy than they have in years past.

Did you notice this?

What is the reason, according to your opinion?

Privacy is becoming more important to people with much of their lives shifting to the Internet.

The era of idealistic thinking about technology is over, and people no longer think of technology as something that achieves this better and brighter tomorrow, as we organize and communicate with the world's information.

People are now thinking more about the ways in which technologies are not meeting their needs.

Signal is part of this effort, as we try to demonstrate that technology can be developed in a different way, all the way from the technology itself that is more centered around user needs, to the organization that produces that technology, which is a non-profit organization that owes no credit to anyone but the interests of its users. Signal.

When it comes to personal data, is there a practice of collecting it that you find most worrying?

I think there is a tendency of people within the tech community to try to describe what Signal is doing as extraordinary, but I think what we're doing is so normal, it would be crazy to sit in a room and have this conversation while sitting right next to us is a stranger taking notes about everything we've said. Unfortunately, this is what now happens in video calls.

To me this is insane.

Few companies have an enormous amount of data about everyone, and it's a dangerous equation.

Do you think antitrust measures by the state or the federal government can help address these privacy concerns?

They do not fully understand these issues, and if they do they do not seem ready to deal with them.

I am more optimistic that there is a growing union effort within the big tech companies, from people who are not only setting material goals for themselves and their colleagues, but goals related to creative control and conscious use of what they produce, that makes me more optimistic.

It is a common argument that personal data is mostly collected for advertising, not for nefarious purposes, and that most people don't care about privacy anyway.

What is your response to that?

I think people care about their privacy.

It is important to realize that real change is happening in secret.

This must be true, if you don't have any truly private space, then you sacrifice too much.