Comment by activescott
2 years ago
I almost skipped reading into this article because I love Signal and it's mission (and their rare commitment to stick to it) and would have known it's good. Yet, the details on expenses and infrastructure was a good read. $1.3M/yr for temporary storage! $6M for verification codes during sign-up!? Toll fraud!? GOOG & FB data center spend, data breaches from GOOG, MSFT, et. al 50 full-time employees vs 3K or 4K for similar apps! All interesting.
The link about the Google "data breach" appears to be about some tax companies being sued for using Google Analytics tracking pixels. Calling this a data breach may be a bit of a stretch.
Thanks. I hadn't dug into that link, but I did based on your comment. It is a Congressional investigation that is rooted on a report from The Markup [1] that, as you note isn't about an accidental breach by Google, but one where multiple companies send extensive PII to Google about site visitors. While not necessarily a "breach", I think this lead of personal data plays to Signal article's point though. The Markup article's git repo with HAR files of what was sent to Google was convincing.[2]
[1]: https://themarkup.org/pixel-hunt/2022/11/22/tax-filing-websi... [2]: https://github.com/the-markup/meta-pixel-taxes