Simple Privacy Fix #4
Text Like Nobody’s Watching
The Issue
Most people default to whatever messaging app came pre-installed or whatever their friends already use, without asking who else can see those conversations — or what happens to the list of people they talk to.
The Privacy Risk
Many popular messengers quietly import your contact list to build a picture of your social network — who you know, how you’re connected — and feed that into advertising systems, whether or not you ever send a message. Some apps go further and don’t even encrypt your conversations end-to-end by default: Telegram, for example, only enables real end-to-end encryption in opt-in “secret chats” between two people — regular chats and groups are readable by Telegram’s servers.
Even when messages are properly encrypted, metadata isn’t: who you talk to, when, how often, your rough location, and whether you’re sharing photos or files. That pattern of contact is frequently more revealing than the words themselves.
The Simple Fix
This is the tool we personally use and recommend without reservation. It meets our listing criteria: no advertising business model, no data selling, personally tested by us.
Industry-Standard Encryption
Signal is a free, nonprofit messenger that encrypts everything by default — text, voice, video, group chats — with no opt-in settings to remember. It doesn’t build an advertising profile from your contacts, because it has no advertising business model at all. Switching feels almost effortless: Signal’s layout and everyday functionality are close enough to WhatsApp that most people feel at home from the first message. And Signal isn’t just one option among many — it’s the standard the industry itself defers to. The Signal Protocol is the same encryption technology WhatsApp licenses for its own messages, minus WhatsApp’s data-sharing baggage.
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Why Just One App
With messaging, the biggest privacy win isn’t finding the most private app — it’s getting the people you actually talk to onto a private one with you. A great app nobody you know uses doesn’t protect anyone. That’s why we point everyone toward Signal instead of splitting attention across several good-but-smaller alternatives: the more people who adopt the same standard, the more private conversations happen by default, for everyone.
Learn More
Further reading and viewing on Signal, from organizations and creators we trust.
- EFF — How to: Use Signal — a step-by-step setup guide from the Electronic Frontier Foundation
- Mozilla Foundation — Signal Privacy Review — an independent privacy assessment
- NBTV — Enable THIS Setting If You Use Signal! — how to hide your phone number with a username
- NBTV — The MOST Private Messaging Apps — broader context on messenger privacy (some Signal-specific details have since changed)
From the Blog
Further reading from the Pretty Simple Privacy blog.
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