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Encryption

Signal Reveals Its Operation Costs, Estimates $50 Million a Year In 2024 (wired.com) 29

Posted by msmash from the cost-of-privacy dept.
gaiageek writes: Of note, given the recent Slashdot article about Signal opening up to trying out usernames, is the $6 million annual cost of sending SMS messages for account verification, which certainly suggests that getting rid of phone number verification would be a significant cost-saving solution.

Signal pays $14 million a year in infrastructure costs, for instance, including the price of servers, bandwidth, and storage. It uses about 20 petabytes per year of bandwidth, or 20 million gigabytes, to enable voice and video calling alone, which comes to $1.7 million a year. The biggest chunk of those infrastructure costs, fully $6 million annually, goes to telecom firms to pay for the SMS text messages Signal uses to send registration codes to verify new Signal accounts' phone numbers.


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Signal Reveals Its Operation Costs, Estimates $50 Million a Year In 2024 More

Signal Reveals Its Operation Costs, Estimates $50 Million a Year In 2024

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  • I thought the whole point of verifying phone numbers was to make it more difficult for spammers to create accounts? Telegram, for example, has a horrible problem with cryptocurrency spam.

    Personally though, I have no dog in this fight because nobody I know uses Signal. For me it's all iMessage, Telegram, and (unfortunately) Zuck's two messaging platforms.

    • "I thought the whole point of verifying phone numbers was to make it more difficult for spammers to create accounts? Telegram, for example, has a horrible problem with cryptocurrency spam."

      I bought a dozen of empty prepaid SIM cards for $1 on EBay to put Whatsapp on cheap tablets for the grannies in the family, after setting up, you can throw them away.
      Stupid system.

      • I bought a dozen of empty prepaid SIM cards for $1 on EBay to put Whatsapp on cheap tablets for the grannies in the family, after setting up, you can throw them away.
        Stupid system.

        Until the number expires about six months after you stopped using it, then gets recycled about six months after that and about two months after that someone takes over Granny's account when they configure Whatsapp on their new phone. Hmm.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          That's how I lost my original Signal account. Changed phone number and phone, no way to recover it.

        • "Until the number expires about six months after you stopped using it, then gets recycled about six months after that and about two months after that someone takes over Granny's account when they configure Whatsapp on their new phone. Hmm."

          Sigh, yes, there goes another $1, anonymity is expensive.

          • Sigh, yes, there goes another $1, anonymity is expensive.

            If that works for you then it sounds reasonable. Has it actually already happened to you? Do you predict it in advance and change their numbers or do you just wait for things to stop working somehow? How do you distribute the new numbers to all the other people in your network that need to know about the change?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by tattood ( 855883 )
        > I bought a dozen of empty prepaid SIM cards for $1 on EBay to put Whatsapp on cheap tablets for the grannies in the family, after setting up, you can throw them way. Stupid system.

        You have 12 grandmothers? How is that possible?
  • Could a lot of it not be offload to a peer to peer network? I dont mind running a process that eats up some storage & bandwidth on a raspberry pi or VPS.

  • Phone numbers need to go away (Score:3)

    by TheNameOfNick ( 7286618 ) on Thursday November 16, 2023 @06:20PM (#64010943)

    Who the fuck thought making phone companies the gatekeepers of online identification was a good idea?

  • Big fan of the app. I have free Googlebux that I can spend in IAPs, but I can't use those to donate to Signal. I'd love to be able to transfer google search feedback coin into Signal operating coin, if they'd add some kind of IAP (vs. Google Pay) donation option.

  • Those bandwidth costs for voice and video are largely because of the need to relay traffic between users to get around NAT.
    If everyone was on a routable IP allowing inbound traffic, then you just need a central server to act as a directory of users or potentially relaying text messages, which is not only low bandwidth but also not latency sensitive so you can have a small number of servers in a couple of places for redundancy instead of spread all over the world for lower latency.

    In terms of "leaking" your

  • I think this also shows how cheap it is to run things if you do not have investors, shareholders and rent seekers siphon off all the money.
    The same project pitched by a private company to some government agency or investor would ask for magnitudes more money.

    Could it be done cheaper? Yeah. I believe every slashdotter who says they could run it for 1/10th.

    But would it be done cheaper?
    As it runs now, some people can take care of all the minute shit I could not be bothered with (e.g. asking people for money) a

  • When is free, not free ? There is usually a catch, gotcha that comes to light sooner or later !

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