Although Signal does not have moves in the numbers of its main competitors, such as WhatsApp or Telegram, it does has managed to earn a relevant position in the market for instant messaging services, thanks to its particular approach to how these services should work, putting security and privacy at the forefront. Something that translates not only to its end-to-end encryption, but also to other measures in this regard.
The most relevant of them is, without a doubt, the little information that the service collects about its users. And it is that unlike other platforms, as Meta does with WhatsApp, Signal only collects and stores the user’s phone number, the date they registered and the date of their last connection to the service. Thus, for example, those responsible will not be able to access the list of your contacts, the log of your conversations or anything like that.
This has made Signal the favorite option for users especially concerned about their privacy. And, in response to this assessment, its managers take great care in the deployment of new functions, as well as in the expansion of existing ones, to avoid that due to a failure in any of these operations, the privacy of its users can be seen engaged. And they not only act in this regard, they also report in detail on these changes, so that their community can feel calm and safe.
Signal now supports 40 person group calls. Building large end-to-end encrypted group calls required some new engineering. Learn how we did it here: https://t.co/i27rRqkI4l
– Signal (@signalapp) December 15, 2021
The latest example of this is found, as we can read on its website, in the Expanding the capacity of Signal’s end-to-end encrypted group video calls to up to 40 people. To implement this function, those responsible for Signal have opted for a selective forwarding system through servers that only retransmit the encrypted signal without accessing it, in order to maintain privacy. The other possibility was that each device transmitted its signal directly to the other devices, but the bandwidth requirements would be much higher.
With this capacity expansion, Signal is the first in capacity in this sense. Currently its main rival (not by numbers, but by privacy) Telegram, allows a maximum of 30 participants, FaceTime supports up to 32, and for now WhatsApp is five, in all cases, yes, with end-to-end encryption.
Those responsible for Signal are already considering a possible future extension of this limit And in any case, provisioning the server infrastructure needed to manage these connections will allow Signal to stay ahead in this regard for a while. Although, personally, I would not be surprised if Telegram was touched in its self-esteem, and will also announce some expansion in this regard soon.
