14 DAY TRIAL // The threats to people's online privacy keep adding up and it's mostly government sources that are spurring all the waves of concern. With everything that's been happening, encrypted messaging app Signal has seen a huge spike in downloads.
More specifically, Signal saw 1.4 million downloads on both iOS and Google Play since the beginning of the year, which is nearly double than last year's downloads for the same period of time, Recode reports.
A testament to the growing worry among Americans following the White House decisions and plan of action regarding online privacy is the fact that 40% of all new installs came from people within the United States.
Between November 8, 2016, when the US elections took place, and the end of the first quarter of 2017, Signal saw a total of 2.2 million new installs worldwide. In fact, the fear that Donald Trump is going to attack people's privacy is so great that Signals's most popular download day was during the President's inauguration. The previous high came the day after Trump won the elections.
Continued growth
Data from App Annie shows that there have been sustained gains in users for Signal and that's easily explained by the network effect. That means that the more people download an app, the more people need their friends to download it too so their conversations are secure. Say you install the app and then tell ten other friends that they have to get it too so your conversations are encrypted. Then they invite people too, and so on. It's a pyramid scheme where the stake is your privacy.
It's a rather scary time for most US citizens who value their online privacy. Trump's administration has already dealt numerous blows to Internet privacy, such as the rule rollback regarding ISP's right to sell off customer's private data without their permission. With the Trump-named new FCC head, net neutrality is also expected to take a hit in the very near future.
