At Signal, we want to make privacy simple. From the beginning, we’ve designed Signal so that your information is in your hands rather than ours. Technologies like Signal Protocol secure your messages so that they are never visible by anyone but you and the intended recipients. Technologies like private contact discovery, private groups, and sealed sender mean that we don’t have a plaintext record of your contacts, social graph, profile name, location, group memberships, groups titles, group avatars, group attributes, or who is messaging whom. Plaintext databases have never been our style. We don’t want to build a system where you trust us with your data; we want to build a system where you don’t have to.
We’ve been working on new techniques based on secure enclaves and key splitting that are designed to enhance and expand general capabilities for private cloud storage. Our aim is to unlock new possibilities and new functionality within Signal which require cross-platform long-term durable state, while verifiably keeping this state inaccessible to everyone but the user who created it.