Signal attempted to run an interesting privacy ad campagin on Instagram


Signal, the privacy-focused messaging app, posted their attempt to run a privacy-based ad campaign on Instagram. The effort, however, didn't make it past Facebook's approval process.

The ads were to be a sort of Mad Libs ad that would have inserted user demographic info. The idea is the ad would display how Facebook classifies you for its advertisers.

We created a multi-variant targeted ad designed to show you the personal data that Facebook collects about you and sells access to. The ad would simply display some of the information collected about the viewer which the advertising platform uses. Facebook was not into that idea.


The blog post has images of example ads.

Last month, Signal documented another privacy stunt involving the Cellebrite surveillance tool. Cellebrite is widely used by law enforcement and governments to break into mobile devices. Signal CEO Matthew Rosenfeld exposed vulnerabilities after Cellebrite promoted the ability to crack Signal messaging. Signal maintains this is only possible with physical access to an unlocked device and the ability to view messages in the app.