The European Commission bets on Signal as the messaging application for its staff

Signal, is an end-to-end encrypted chat application which is gaining more and more acceptance as a secure means of preserving the confidentiality of online communications.

And this time, The European Commission is convinced of its effectiveness as it now recommends that its staff use Signal for outside conversations. The move is part of the EU's efforts to increase cybersecurity after several high-profile incidents that shocked diplomats and officials.

As several incidents with Facebook products have been reported for a number of time, Whether it is from the same social network application, its Messenger application, WhatsApp or some other of its products, Facebook is always collecting data in one way or another.

It is because of that In Europe, the social network in recent years has had to face various lawsuits and controversies because of this.

With that now the aim of the European Commission is to increase the security of your communications and the instruction began showing up on employee internal message boards in early February.

"Signal has been selected as the recommended application for public instant messaging."

In fact, Signal is a cross-platform and open source messaging application available on Android and iOS, which allows communication in encrypted form.

There is also a client for Windows PCs, macOS, and Debian-based versions of Linux. This desktop version is designed with the Electron framework. Signal is developed by the Open Whisper Systems organization and is released under the GPL v3 license as free and open source software. This software has been endorsed and recommended by several large organizations since its appearance in 2013.

And it seems that the trigger for this recommendation by the European Commission for switching to Signal, it is because Facebook has no intention of changing its policies Nor does it have the intention of regulating itself to the requirements of the European Union.

It was Thierry Breton, the EU's industry commissioner, who sent a tough message to Zuckerberg this past week saying that the company must comply with the laws of Europe and not the other way around.

"We are not the ones who must adapt to this company, it is this company that must adapt to us," Breton told reporters who consulted him after his meeting with Zuckerberg.

The European Commission is not the only government body who has instructed his staff to switch to Signal.

Well last December, The Guardian reported that a UK party told its MPs to switch WhatsApp service.

At the time, it was speculated that the change was made to take advantage of Signal's missing messages feature to stop leaks like the ones that became known while using WhatsApp.

However, a party spokesperson claimed it was because their recent influx of newly elected MPs meant they had exceeded WhatsApp's maximum group size.

In addition, WhatsApp had implemented several changes, of which many complained as the application began to ban the accounts of users who according to "spam" in the service. Although basically the application, when it detects that many messages are being sent, bans you, forcing you to switch to WhatsApp Business.

For its part, Signal, has the support of The Guardian Project and Edward Snowden as they mention that the app is perfect because of its end-to-end encryption and open source technology.

"Because it's open source, you can check what's going on under the hood," Preneel said. Signal also has the support of WhatsApp founder Brian Acton, who left the company in 2017 after running into Facebook management.

Since then, Acton has not stopped to campaign for the dismantling of Facebook. Also, although WhatsApp technology is based on the Signal protocol (known as Open Whisper Systems), it is not open source.

Do you finally think this marks the beginning of the end of Facebook in the European Union? Or do you think the social network and its products will end up being regularized?