When I join a group, it’s almost always true that the group will be using one or more communication technologies to organise and communicate within the group. Sometimes that is email, sometimes it is Slack, but most frequently it is a messaging app that has a group chat capability. I would like to convince you that the best technology for this purpose will include end-to-end encryption and be built in such a way that the company or organisation that operates or provides the application cannot access the content of your group’s communication - even faced with a warrant. Quite frankly, this is the desirable and privacy-protective option no matter the nature of the group - from knitting circles to strike planning committees. So in this recipe I will take you through the steps you need to move from WhatsApp to Signal, but you should be able to replicate this approach for other messaging apps.

The stakes

When you use technology that doesn’t have these privacy-protective characteristics, a few things happen. Your, and your group’s, metadata is harvested. That means who talked to who, when, and for how long. In a best-case scenario, that is just to serve ads and increase engagement. For example, if you use WhatsApp, you are using an app owned by Meta. Meta licenses the Signal Protocol, which provides end-to-end encryption, but it harvests the metadata.

The metadata tells Meta who you message, when, how often, which groups you are in, and your contact graph - the map of who is connected to whom. If you have ever watched a TV detective or cop show, you might well have seen a whiteboard depicting a criminal organisation showing how everyone is identified and connected. Sometimes this might be presented as a corkboard with pins and red yarn connecting everything. You have been sorted and categorised and are available for targeting and exploitation.

When you use an app like WhatsApp, the company that provides the app becomes included in every group discussion or even direct messages. Signal - the company, not the protocol - is structurally set up so that it cannot do this. That means only the actual participants in a conversation are parties to the conversation.

By using Signal, not only does your group not feed into each member’s ad profile or otherwise become a surveillance subject, but it is also a living demonstration that there IS an alternative to surveillance capitalism.

Time & difficulty

If you can install an app, you are most of the way there. You won’t need deep technical skills. The difficulty will be social. You will need to overcome the reluctance that some members of the group will have to change. They are accustomed to the current situation and will need to be persuaded that the gain at the end of the move will be worth the pain at the start of the move. This really becomes a discussion for the group to have and to work together on.

What you’ll need

You will need a smartphone. Either an iOS phone (Apple) or an Android phone (Google, Samsung, and most others). You can use the desktop Signal app, but it will be linked to the app on your smartphone. But never do this on a work or shared computer unless you want to share your private chats with your employer or whoever else has access to the computer. And for a higher level of privacy, consider using a secondary number (see “Going further” below). When you register, you will have to provide Signal with a phone number to register. You should be aware that installing Signal may send a notification to your contacts that you have joined Signal. You can hide it after registration, and use a chosen username should you choose to do so. You will also need a way to store the Registration Lock PIN should you need to recover your Signal profile and settings after, for example, losing your phone. The PIN prevents someone from re-registering your number. I recommend a password manager, but you could write it down on paper. I will be doing a post on password managers later in this series.

Steps

It’s pretty straightforward to actually install Signal.

• You find and install it from the App Store on your phone - where you normally install apps.

• When you run Signal the first time, you will be asked to register with the phone number of the phone you are on.

• Set up a profile name/photo which will be encrypted and visible only to people you message.

• Registration Lock PIN. Go to Settings -> Account and turn on Registration Lock and set a PIN. Write it down or store it in a password manager. Signal can’t reset it. This prevents anyone else from re-registering your number.

• Phone number privacy. Settings -> Privacy -> Phone Number

  • Who can see my number -> Nobody

  • Who can find me by number -> Nobody

  • Set a username so people can chat without your number. Both of you will need a recent version of the app for this feature to work.

• Disappearing messages. This can be set as a default (Settings -> Privacy -> Default timer for new chats) or per chat with a duration starting in seconds and going up to a few weeks. Note that disappearing only works if the other end doesn’t take a screenshot or photograph.

• Lock screen leakage. Remember to hide your message content in lock-screen notification previews (Signal → Settings → Notifications). Otherwise messages show on a locked phone.

• Verify safety numbers. Open a chat -> contact name -> View Safety Number. Then scan the QR code together (easiest when first setting up the chat with the other person). You can compare the number visually or audibly as well. This is the single most-skipped, highest-value step for higher-risk users.

• Moving a group. There is no WhatsApp-to-Signal group migration — a Signal invite link creates or joins a Signal group, and no WhatsApp members or history come across. Start a fresh Signal group and invite people to it. You should know that anyone can forward the invite link to anyone because an invite link lets anyone holding it join. Remember that group members can see each other so you should share the link privately, revoke it after the move, and set number-privacy first. This reduces the risk of the member list being exposed.

• Clean up. After moving, disable and delete WhatsApp cloud backups and old chats, or the shared history lingers in plaintext.

It would be nice if there was an interoperable standard to help you move from one app, like WhatsApp, to another, but that isn’t really a thing. Basically, you and your group will be starting fresh on Signal. You can “Export chat” from WhatsApp, but only on a per-chat basis. You can do a Chat backup in WhatsApp (Settings -> Chats -> Chat Backup) If you have used WhatsApp cloud backup without opting in to encrypted backups, then each person in the group who has opted for that becomes a possible point of exposure.

If a menu has moved since this was written, Signal’s own help pages are the authoritative, always-current reference.

Check it worked

• Send a disappearing message to someone and watch it vanish on both ends.

• Verify a safety number with a friend. A clean match means no interception of the keys used to encrypt the conversation between you. You can only do this check if the other person or device is handy.

• Confirm Who can find me by number = Nobody. Ask a friend to try to find you by number (they can’t) and then by username (they can).

Once you have set this up, you will have significantly increased the privacy and confidentiality of your group.

Going further

If you have reason to believe that you are at higher risk (an investigative reporter, for example), consider the following:

• Register with a secondary number (VoIP/second SIM), so your real number isn’t the account identifier. I’ll have more to say about this later in the series.

• Only use your username - hide your number completely. By the way, don’t pick a username that you use elsewhere (the way that I use privacycdn, for example) if you want anonymity.

• Verify your safety numbers with every important contact, not just one.

• Turn on screen lock/screen security in Signal privacy settings.

Final thoughts

Everyone is on WhatsApp; Signal will only work if your contacts move. They can stay on WhatsApp for other groups and friends, but if they don’t want to move, for whatever reason, it could shrink your group. Alternatively, being on a secure platform may attract new members. Your mileage will vary.

You don’t have to abandon WhatsApp on day one; move the sensitive conversations (organising, anything that would harm someone if exposed) to Signal first, and let the rest follow.

What Signal does NOT do?

No protection is perfect. If your phone falls into someone else’s hands who can open the phone, if one of your group members takes screenshots, or if someone hacks your phone, information you thought private may leak or be shared. I’ll be talking about knowing your rights and crossing borders in forthcoming recipes.

• Signal still requires a phone number to register (the number is the identifier, even if hidden).

• Signal doesn’t hide that you use Signal from someone who has your number and checks.

• Signal can’t stop the person you’re talking to from screenshotting, forwarding, or being compromised.

• The Signal chat metadata available is minimal but not nothing — Signal knows the account exists, its creation date, and last-connection date.

• Signal is a US-based nonprofit (Signal Foundation); but since it retains almost nothing, jurisdiction matters little in practice.

The flip side of holding so little: if Signal were ever subpoenaed, about all it could hand a court is your phone number, your account-creation date, and your last-connection date — nothing else.

No recipe here is a guarantee. It makes it more difficult to watch you, but it doesn’t make you invisible. It won’t stop a determined, well-resourced adversary. Weigh your own risks, and see the introduction for the full picture.

Researched and copy-edited with AI assistance; the writing is mine.

Introduction

If your day job is in technology or is technology-adjacent, you know that you’ve automatically become the unofficial tech support for friends and family. Because my day job is working in privacy, I frequently get asked if I have hacking skills, to which the answer is no. However, after that, I sometimes get asked for advice on how people, or organisations that I’m involved in, can do better in protecting their own or their members’ privacy or the security of the organisation. This series is my response to those questions and concerns. I want to do a little research and create a useful recipe I can use as a response. That’s way better than having to extemporaneously provide an answer when having a beer at the bar after an event. That hardly ever turns out well (the response, not the bar).

When I was much more technical than I am now, I used to be a fan of the O’Reilly publishing house and their cookbooks, which were recipes for doing things with technology. That’s why I’ve called this series a digital activist’s cookbook. What I’m attempting to do here is, in each recipe, to provide an answer to a single question. For example, the first post is how to move from WhatsApp, owned by surveillance-capitalism giant Meta, to Signal, an end-to-end encrypted app that provides meaningful functionality and real privacy protection. I hope to produce a series of these recipes in the coming days, weeks, and months, and I hope you find them useful.

Who it’s for

I have been, or have engaged with, several different types of activists in my life. But the fact of the matter is, whether you’re planning a demonstration to protest surveillance capitalism, coordinating a picket line, or just arranging a meeting of your quilting club, you really shouldn’t have to worry about other people listening in or sharing information that you don’t want to share. In other words, this series is for almost everybody. Fair warning: I am writing it from the perspective of an activist who thinks there are alternatives to the way we do things today.

There are no perfect solutions.

The funny thing about privacy is that it is, in my view, social and not individual. Privacy is how two or more people protect their communications (the content of what is said) and information about their relationships (metadata about who talks to who, when, and where). So I have one expectation of privacy when I speak quietly to a friend about a confidential issue but a different expectation of privacy when I’m speaking at a public meeting in front of a large number of people. I have expectations of privacy - or, more properly, an expectation of anonymity - when I walk down the street. I want to be able to have those same expectations when I’m in the digital realm. In other words, individual privacy is dependent on context and other people.

That all being said, there is no such thing as perfect privacy. There is no such thing as complete anonymity, and there is no such thing as complete security. The more private, secure, and anonymous you want to be - especially in a world rampant with surveillance and oversharing - the more difficult it will be for you to approach your desired state. The recipes below don’t promise perfection, and I will try to explain the limits of what you can do.

Audre Lorde’s “…the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house” is sometimes misinterpreted to say that activists have to eschew every tool of capitalism. The fact is that sometimes you need to use the digital tools at hand. For example, you are reading my Substack right now. Substack is good for a lot of things, but it loads its reading font (Spectral) from Google’s font CDN (Content Delivery Network), so opening this post hands your IP address to Google, and I can’t change that on Substack. But like using Facebook to reach people where they are, Substack’s utility for this kind of content is appealing. And frankly, Google’s CDN is so ubiquitous that the marginal increase in risk this creates for you is, I hope, minuscule. I will say that I hope this series will help you and your friends tear down the digital master’s house.

How a recipe works

Each recipe will start with identifying what’s at stake, or what question the recipe is addressing. Once that’s established, the recipe will set out the practical steps you will need to take, and will finish with recommendations on how to check that the recipe worked. I’m still working on some of the details, so the recipe format may evolve over time. What won’t evolve is that I want to identify a problem and provide you with some practical options on addressing your concerns.

Why a raccoon

The O’Reilly books that are part of the inspiration for this series all used animals on their covers. Toronto’s trash pandas (raccoons) are all over the city and the Don River that runs through the city from the north into the lake in Toronto’s Portlands to the west of me (hence East of the Don).

The recipes

Recipes will appear here as they're published. First up: Moving to Signal from WhatsApp.

These recipes make it more difficult to watch you, but they don't make you invisible. Stopping a determined, well-resourced adversary is close to impossible. Every activist is, to some extent, a target, so weigh your own risks and decide what's worth doing. Nothing here is a guarantee, but doing something beats doing nothing.

Researched and copy-edited with AI assistance; the writing is mine.