Protecting free expression and enabling secure global communication through open source privacy technology.
Our Mission
Protect free expression and enable secure global communication through open source privacy technology.
Privacy First
With our flagship product, Signal Messenger, we believe championing user privacy means keeping your data out of anyone’s hands, including our own, rather than “responsibly” managing your data.
Open Source
As a committed member of the open source community, we publish our technology and share knowledge to encourage other companies to adopt it in their own products and services.
Nonprofit
Signal Foundation is a 501c3 nonprofit. We’re proud of that designation and we’re out to prove that a nonprofit can innovate and scale as well as any business driven by a profit motive.
Foundation + LLC
Signal Foundation formed in 2018 to support Signal Messenger which originated in 2012. Through the Foundation, we have been able to support Signal's growth and ongoing operations as well as investigate the future of private communication.
Privacy over Profit
Signal is a nonprofit with no advertisers or investors, sustained only by the people who use and value it.
Why Foundation + LLC Structure?
We formed Signal Foundation as the parent of Signal Messenger because we aspire to one day promote other privacy preserving projects that ladder to the same mission.
Free for Everyone
We rely on the support of the community to deliver Signal Messenger as a free app to millions around the world. Will you support the cause?
Board Members
Amba Kak
Amba Kak is a lawyer and technology policy expert, with over a decade of trans-national expertise advising government regulators, industry, civil society organizations, and philanthropies. She is currently the Executive Director of the AI Now Institute, a leading policy research organization in New York and Senior Fellow at the Cybersecurity and Privacy Institute at Northeastern University.
Amba served as Senior Advisor at the U.S. Federal Trade Commission where she advised the regulator on emerging technology issues. Prior to AI Now, Amba was Global Policy Advisor at Mozilla where she developed and advanced the organizations' positions on issues such as data privacy laws and network neutrality in the Asia-Pacific region and beyond. She currently sits on the Board of Directors program committee at the Mozilla Foundation. Amba received her BA LLB (Hons) from the National University of Juridical Sciences in India. She has a Masters in Law (BCL) and an MSc in the Social Science of the Internet at the University of Oxford, which she attended as a Rhodes Scholar.
Brian Acton
Brian Acton is an entrepreneur and computer programmer who co-founded the messaging app WhatsApp in 2009. After the app was sold to Facebook in 2014, Acton decided to leave the company due to differences surrounding the use of customer data and targeted advertising to focus his efforts on non-profit ventures. In February of 2018, Acton invested $50 million of his own money to start the Signal Foundation alongside Moxie Marlinspike. Signal Foundation is a nonprofit organization dedicated to doing the foundational work around making private communication accessible, secure and ubiquitous.
Prior to founding WhatsApp and Signal Foundation, Acton worked as a software builder for more than 25 years at companies like Apple, Yahoo, and Adobe.
Jay Sullivan
Jay is a product builder with an extensive background in senior product and engineering leadership roles in consumer technology. Most recently, he was General Manager of Twitter's consumer and revenue products, leading engineering, product, design, research and data science. Prior to Twitter, Jay was at Facebook, where he led the development of Reality Labs' AI Assistant and then led the Privacy, Integrity, and Systems product teams for Messenger and Instagram Direct. Jay was the SVP of Product and Chief Operating Officer at Mozilla, where he led major releases of Firefox during its ascent and was an evangelist for the web platform and for giving people more choice and control online.
Jay has also been a start-up founder, and spent the early part of his career as a software engineer and engineering manager at Firefly Network (purchased by Microsoft) and Oracle.
Jay holds a B.S. in Applied Mathematics from Yale College and is the co-inventor of several United States patents.
Katherine Maher
Katherine Maher is the former CEO and Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation, responsible for Wikipedia. She is currently a non-resident Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council, where her work focuses on the intersection of technology, human rights, and democracy. Prior to Wikimedia, she was the Director of Advocacy for the digital rights organization Access Now. Maher is a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader, and a security fellow at the Truman National Security Project. She is on the board of directors for the Center for Technology and Democracy, Consumer Reports, the Digital Public Library of America, Adventure Scientists, and System.com, as well as a trustee of the American University of Beirut. She is an appointed member of the U.S. Department of State's Foreign Affairs Policy Board, where she advises the Secretary of State on technology policy. She received her Bachelor's degree in Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies in 2005 from New York University's College of Arts and Science, after studying at the Arabic Language Institute of the American University in Cairo, Egypt, and Institut français d'études arabes de Damas (L'IFEAD) in Damascus, Syria.
Meredith Whittaker
Meredith Whittaker is Signal's President and a member of the Signal Foundation Board of Directors.
She has over 17 years of experience in tech, spanning industry, academia, and government. Before joining Signal as President, she was the Minderoo Research Professor at NYU, and served as the Faculty Director of the AI Now Institute which she co-founded. Her research and scholarly work helped shape global AI policy and shift the public narrative on AI to better recognize the surveillance business practices and concentration of industrial resources that modern AI requires. Prior to NYU, she worked at Google for over a decade, where she led product and engineering teams, founded Google's Open Research Group, and co-founded M-Lab, a globally distributed network measurement platform that now provides the world's largest source of open data on internet performance. She also helped lead organizing at Google. She was one of the core organizers pushing back against the company's insufficient response to concerns about AI and its harms, and was a central organizer of the Google Walkout. She has advised the White House, the FCC, the City of New York, the European Parliament, and many other governments and civil society organizations on privacy, security, artificial intelligence, internet policy, and measurement. And she recently completed a term as Senior Advisor on AI to the Chair at the US Federal Trade Commission.
Emeritus
Moxie Marlinspike
Moxie Marlinspike is the founder of Signal.