> "both the potential for their platform to be abused, and let’s face it, the potential for their platform to disappear off the face of the internet..."
The potential? Seriously? There is no question a service like this will be abused (Let's ask Erdogan this question). No serious criminal is going to NOT consider using Signal as a comms medium. People who need to evade snooping will use it. People who need privacy will use it.
As for the other. For this product, either you believe in your principles or you don't. It was the whole premise of the product. Without it, there is no need for it. There are "better" (easier) alternatives.
It's like building a back-up product and saying, you know, we could save costs by not always reliably having the expected data. Yes, true. But why have your product in the first place?
The point is that it's good for a company to be willing to discuss these things. If Signal had a culture where the principles and direction of the company are beyond discussion, that'd be a problem - both because it would make Signal a worse place to work, and because it would make compromising the spirit of the principles much easier.
It's probably helpful to look at a less emotionally charged principle like "customer focused". If your company enshrines "customer focus" as an inviolate principle, and nobody's comfortable discussing the value or meaning of "customer focus", you won't end up with a laser focus on the customer. You'll end up rudderless, because anyone skilled at office politics can justify whatever they want to do by declaring it customer focused.
The potential? Seriously? There is no question a service like this will be abused (Let's ask Erdogan this question). No serious criminal is going to NOT consider using Signal as a comms medium. People who need to evade snooping will use it. People who need privacy will use it.
As for the other. For this product, either you believe in your principles or you don't. It was the whole premise of the product. Without it, there is no need for it. There are "better" (easier) alternatives.
It's like building a back-up product and saying, you know, we could save costs by not always reliably having the expected data. Yes, true. But why have your product in the first place?