Product Management Confabulation
What Product Managers are talking about.
AI is “not open in any sense,” the battle over encryption is far from won, and Signal’s principled (and uncompromising) approach may complicate interoperability efforts, warned the company’s president, Meredith Whittaker. But it’s not all bad news. (Actually, it is all bad news, because I wrote up the good news separately.) Speaking on stage with […]
© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Adding usernames to a messaging app may seem like a standard feature, but for Signal, such identifiers were anathema to its mission of total privacy and security — until now. The upcoming 7.0 version adds usernames, but the company’s president, Meredith Whittaker, explained that this was nowhere near as simple a decision as it may […]
© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
We’re announcing an exciting addition to our speaker lineup for StrictlyVC Los Angeles on February 29. Jesse Lyu, founder and CEO of rabbit Inc., will be joining us and showcasing rabbit r1, the pocket-sized AI hardware assistant that took CES — and the broader news cycle — by storm last month. Lyu is an entrepreneur […]
© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
End-to-end encrypted messaging app Signal is launching usernames, the company announced today. Up until now, you have had to give someone your phone number to chat with them on Signal. Now, you can create a unique username that you can use instead. Usernames are currently launching in beta, and will be rolling out to all […]
© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
End-to-end encrypted messaging app Signal is rolling out a new Stories feature to all users on Android and iOS, the company announced on Monday. The official launch comes a few weeks after the company first began beta testing the feature with select users. Signal plans to release its Stories feature on desktop soon.
As with other platforms’ Stories features, Signal Stories allow users to create and share images, videos and texts that automatically disappear after 24 hours. Signal notes that like everything else in its app, Stories are end-to-end encrypted.
Signal users have the option to choose who can see their Stories by navigating to their settings. From there, you can choose to share your Stories with everyone in your phone’s contact list who uses Signal, anyone you’ve had a one-on-one conversation with in Signal or anyone whose message request you’ve accepted. You also have the option to manually hide your Story from specific people. If you would rather choose to share your Stories with a smaller subset of people, you can create a custom Story. In addition, you have the option to share Stories to existing group chats.
Like with read receipts for chats, you can decide if you want to send view receipts for Stories you look at and whether you see who’s seen your Stories. You can turn view receipts on or off in the Settings menu.
You may be wondering why a messaging app like Signal is adding Stories, but the company says Stories “happen to be one of the most common feature requests” among users, which is why it decided to add them to its platform.
Image Credits: Signal
“Stories have emerged to serve these specific functions and others in the broader communications landscape, and many of us have integrated them as one of the ways that we connect with one another,” the company said in a blog post. “That’s why they have a natural place in any messaging app, including Signal. People use them, people want them, so we’re providing a way to do stories privately. And without having to wade through a sea of ads.”
Signal is aware that not everyone will see Stories as a welcome addition to the app, which is why it’s offering an opt-out setting for the feature. If you’re not interested in seeing or posting Stories, you can opt out by going into your settings and selecting the “Turn of stories” option.
The company says although the addition of Stories may seem like a “big shift” for the app, they’re just another way for users to privately communicate with people. Signal notes that its Stories feature isn’t designed to help people build a following or amplify content for engagement, and that it instead sees Stories as a way to facilitate intimate conversations.
Signal is a little late to game when it comes to Stories, which first rose to popularity through Snapchat. Over the years, the ephemeral feature has been adopted by nearly every popular platform, including Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, WhatsApp, Twitter and LinkedIn.
Signal is the latest app to roll out a Stories feature by Aisha Malik originally published on TechCrunch
Food delivery giant DoorDash has confirmed a data breach that exposed customers’ personal information.
In a blog post shared with TechCrunch ahead of its publication at market close, DoorDash said malicious hackers stole credentials from employees of a third-party vendor that were then used to gain access to some of DoorDash’s internal tools.
DoorDash said the attackers accessed names, email addresses, delivery addresses and phone numbers of DoorDash customers. For a “smaller subset” of users, hackers accessed partial payment card information, including card type and the last four digits of the card number.
For DoorDash delivery drivers, or Dashers, hackers accessed data that “primarily included name and phone number or email address.” Users of Wolt, the Helsinki-based online ordering and delivery company acquired by DoorDash last year, are unaffected.
DoorDash says that a “small percentage” of users were affected by the incident but declined to say how many users it currently has or provide an accurate number of affected users.
The company said it cut off the third-party vendor’s access to its systems after discovering “unusual and suspicious” activity.
DoorDash did not name the third-party vendor, which “provides services that require limited access to some internal tools,” according to DoorDash spokesperson Justin Crowley, but confirmed to TechCrunch that the vendor breach is linked to the phishing campaign that compromised SMS and messaging giant Twilio on August 4. Researchers linked these attacks to a wider phishing campaign by the same hacking group, dubbed “0ktapus,” which has stolen close to 10,000 employee credentials from at least 130 organizations, including Twilio, Signal, internet companies and outsourced customer service providers, since March.
DoorDash would not say when it discovered it was compromised, but its spokesperson said that the company took time to “fully investigate what happened, what users were impacted and how they were impacted” before disclosing the data breach.
DoorDash says that since discovering the compromise the company hired an unnamed cybersecurity expert to help with its ongoing investigation and is taking action to “further enhance DoorDash’s already robust security systems.”
This isn’t the first time that hackers have stolen customer data from DoorDash’s systems. In 2019, the company reported a data breach affecting 4.9 million customers, delivery workers and merchants who had their information stolen by hackers. It also blamed the breach on an unnamed third-party service provider.
Read more:
From the archives:
An Indian upstart, co-founded by a group of journalists, that seeks to disrupt how people follow news and what they consume has raised capital as it prepares to accelerate its growth and broaden its offering.
The Signal is aiming to serve a need for the modern pace of life where everybody is busy, said Dinesh Narayanan, its co-founder and editor in an interview. “People still want to keep up with what’s happening in the world. They can read newspapers or multiple news outlets, but obviously they don’t have time to do it,” he said.
The Noida-headquartered startup has been attempting to solve this with an eponymous newsletter and podcast where it curates, produces and discusses what they argue are the most important developments from the world of business, technology, economy and policy.
The newsletter, which goes out six times a week, features nearly a dozen stories in each edition and deep dives into two to three major stories, offering additional context and commentary from a team of journalists who have previously worked at newsrooms including The Economic Times, The Quint, YourStory, The Morning Context and Reuters.
Signal says it is aiming to serve savvy audiences in India and beyond. It has amassed over 38,000 subscribers, a base that includes several unicorn founders, lawmakers and policy executives. Its newsletter goes out at 8 AM and requires just five to seven minutes of reader time, said Narayanan.
The startup, which plans to expand its coverage into more areas including sports and launch newer products, isn’t currently charging its readers and listeners. Instead, most newsletters are currently backed by big name sponsors. Narayanan argued that a sponsor-backed model is the more sustainable way to monetize a news product in the country.
“Everybody talks about this total addressable market, right? Nobody really knows what exactly it is today because you have a population of probably about 150-200 million people who can afford to pay. There are so many avenues available to people which is giving them free news. It is a very small sliver of the audience which would actually pay,” he said.
“So some of them would be paying because it’s good journalism, some of them would be paying because they give exactly the amount of news which they want, some of them would be paying for the depth of content. I think the existing players are already competing for this rather small pie.”
Each Saturday, Signal publishes original stories in a newsletter called The Intersection.
The Signal, whose most other founding members including Venkat Ananth and Patanjali Pahwa are also journalists, is the latest independent media venture in the South Asian nation, which is the one of the world’s largest news markets. The founding team also includes ex-Google India public policy official Rajneil Kamath and Chinmay Bhogle, formerly of Times Internet, Star Sports and Tata Motors.
Several journalists in the country have left their influential jobs at top media houses in recent years to build something of their own as they grow frustrated at attempting to bring systemic changes to the way legacy outlets work – or take inspiration from a similar flow in the U.S., where journalists have traditionally shown more entrepreneurial instincts.
But unlike the U.S. and the UK, where several media venture founders have made successful exits, India is yet to demonstrate any.
At the end of the day, the future of the Signal depends on the purchasing power per capita of the nation, Narayanan said. As the “purchasing power increases and the consumption patterns change, purely on that basis … exits and the size of exits are a function of that. It’s a business. Yeah, so it is definitely tied to the fortunes of the country as a whole,” he added.
For now, that’s not something The Signal needs to worry about.
The startup said Monday it has raised a new funding round, but did not disclose the size. The Signal’s angel investors include CRED’s Miten Sampat, Zomato co-founder Deepinder Goyal, Unacademy co-founder Gaurav Munjal, Haptik co-founder Aakrit Vaish, media entrepreneur Parry Ravindranathan, Vue.ai founder Ashwini Asokan and DealStreetAsia founder and CEO Joji Philip Thomas. Investment fund LetsVenture led the round, while venture capital fund Capital A also participated in it, Narayanan said. Fintech-focused fund Rainmatter also invested in the round, according to a regulatory filing. (Narayanan and Rainmatter didn’t comment on the fund’s participation.)
“Venkat, Patanjali, Dinesh & Roshni P Nair have authored some of the most important stories in India tech over the past 5 years, and I am very excited to see them build The Signal as a way to enable readers make sense of it all,” said Sampat. “India, and eventually the world, needs an outlet that goes beyond newsflashes and gets deep into nuanced reportage through a mix of curation, original writing and new formats of sense-making.”