This past year has been a big one for technology and communication in my household. We celebrated birthdays via Zoom and Google Meet. I restarted an email correspondence with a dear friend where we joked about the old fashion style of letter writing. I even, on occasion, picked up the phone to call someone.

And I texted. Holy Moley, I texted. I texted late into the night after the whole family was asleep. I texted first thing in the morning to respond to friends’ late night text. I texted in snatched seconds while my kid was otherwise occupied. I texted at meals (though I try not to). I texted one handed, loading laundry or dishes with the other. I took text-breaks from homework. I texted.

With friends and family, we wrote about the everyday and the life-altering: kids, work, politics, society, our own bodies, our relationships, our homes, our communities. We wrote and write about our lives: things we want to shout from the mountain tops and things we want to keep very private.

As more and more conversations moved onto text, I felt a growing unease. My partner and I had switch to Signal long ago, but a lot of these very personal conversations were happening on WhatsApp and on Apple SMS, neither of which is sufficiently encrypted.

It’s a struggle to convince people to switch to a new service for texting. If they’ve been using WhatsApp or their phone’s built in SMS for a long time it’s familiar and it’s convenient. And if you’re in a large group chat and you can’t convince everyone to switch then you will either lose members from your group or perhaps the whole switch effort will collapse.

To help you convince friends and family make the switch to an end-to-end encrypted app like Signal for messaging, here are three reasons we should be concerned about our privacy:

1. We don’t control who is looking at our texts and its metadata
2. We don’t control what they get to see
3. We don’t control how they will interpret our texts and its metadata out of context or in the future

In 2013, Edward Snowden’s revelations about the NSA’s surveillance practices revealed that the U.S. government was collecting, storing, and analyzing “the e-mail, voice, text and video chats of an unknown number of Americans.” In November, 2019 Congress re-authorized NSA’s surveillance of internet communications. A reform bill is currently in committee.

Although we cannot know for sure that our individual text messages are being collected by the government, we should know that they can be. For some people, knowing this is enough to make the switch to an end-to-end encrypted messaging app like Signal. These apps protect your text messages because, as Signal writes, “We can’t read your messages or listen to your calls, and no one else can either. Privacy isn’t an optional mode — it’s just the way that Signal works. Every message, every call, every time.” In other words, if the government or other actor compels Signal to hand over its data, the only data they have to hand over is encrypted.

Even knowing all this, other folks need a little more convincing to make the switch. In my next post I will talk about the four Fs I have encountered when trying to convince people to switch their text messaging to a more secure system: Fatalism, Fine for me, Fatigue, and Freedom of Speech.