This is your signal to invest in secure messaging.
After The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, was mistakenly added to a Signal group chat involving top White House officials, it begs the question: Which messaging apps are most secure?
While the security snafu prompted scrutiny from President Donald Trump as to whether the Signal app is “defective,” the platform is, in fact, one of the most secure messengers on the market, according to Inc.
“Signal is the gold standard in private comms,” the app’s president, Meredith Whittaker, said on X.
“We’re open source, nonprofit, and we develop and apply e2ee [end-to-end encryption] and privacy-preserving tech across our system to protect metadata and message contents.”
“End-to-end encryption,” per Inc., means that messages can only be read by the intended recipient and the sender. And, unlike other messaging apps, users aren’t forced to link a cell phone number to their account in order to sign up, but it does enforce contact verification to guarantee the identity of the people messaged.
“In general, Signal is widely considered the most secure consumer messaging app because third parties can verify its security claims, and the company does not have access to metadata about your conversations,” Inc. stated.
When compared to rivals like WhatsApp, Whittaker argued that competitors don’t measure up to Signal’s security.
“Neither consumer nor business WhatsApp protects intimate metadata — like contact list, who’s messaging whom, when, profile photo, etc. And, when compelled, like all companies that collect the data to begin with, they turn this important, revealing data over,” she wrote on X.
The exact content of messages sent with WhatsApp is indeed encrypted, but the metadata — including recipient information — is not, Inc. warned. In fact, it is stored by WhatsApp, a Meta-owned company.
iMessage, the messaging system used for communication between Apple devices, is the “best and most secure option” — as long as you’re only contacting other people with iPhones.
According to Inc., Apple encrypts messages individually in group chats, which “is technically more secure” than Signal’s method.
“Apple also says its encryption is designed for post-quantum computing,” Inc. reports.
“The idea is that eventually quantum computers will be able to break encryption easily enough to read protected messages, but Apple is designing its algorithm to resist those types of future capabilities.”
The disadvantages to iMessage, however, are that texts between an iPhone and Android device are significantly less secure, relying on RCS in best case scenario, or SMS at worst. Neither method is encrypted, per Inc.
Additionally, relying on iCloud to backup text conversations — without Advanced Data Protection — means your messages are stored on Apple servers and can be turned over to law enforcement if the company is asked.
Telegram is also a popular messaging service, but communication is only encrypted while in transit, Inc. reports, and is encrypted on Telegram’s servers, but it “makes your messages vulnerable to anyone who has access to those servers.”
“It’s worth mentioning, however, that it does not matter how private or secure the encryption is on a messaging platform — if you include someone in a group chat and send a message to that group, they’re going to be able to read the message,” Inc. stated.
“Or, put another way, the problem here has nothing to do with encryption, and everything to do with human error.”
