What you're agreeing to
Signal's Terms of Service are minimal because the service is designed to hold as little data as possible. You must be 13 or older and agree not to use Signal for illegal activity. Signal can terminate accounts that abuse the platform but has almost no information about users to act on.
Privacy in plain English
Signal knows your phone number, when you registered, and the last date you connected, and nothing else. Your messages, calls, contacts, and group memberships are end-to-end encrypted and inaccessible to Signal. When the US government subpoenaed Signal in 2021, the only data they could hand over was the registration date and last connection time.
Terms of Service: Breakdown
This means Signal's terms barely exist because there is almost nothing for them to govern.
Key Clauses- Phone number requirement: Signal requires a phone number to register. This is the only personal identifier they hold.
- No data portability: if you change devices without a backup, your message history is gone. Signal cannot recover it because they never had it.
- Abuse limitations: Signal can ban accounts that send spam, but the ban applies only to the phone number.
- none. Signal is a nonprofit and has no advertising business.
Privacy Policy: Breakdown
This means a Signal data breach would expose essentially nothing about you. No red flags were identified. The architecture enforces privacy by design: even Signal engineers cannot read your messages. Sealed Sender technology means Signal cannot see who is messaging whom. Disappearing messages can be set to auto-delete, leaving no trace on either device. Third-party sharing: zero. Signal has no advertising partnerships, no data brokers, and no revenue from user data. Privacy advocate verdict: use Signal for anything you would not want read aloud in a courtroom.
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