Meredith Whittaker practices what she preaches. As president of the Signal Foundation, she is a clarion call in support of privacy for all. But he doesn’t just spout empty words.
In 2018, she burst into the public eye as one of the organizers of the Google walkouts, mobilizing 20,000 of the search giant’s employees in a dual protest against the company’s support for state surveillance and failures regarding sexual misconduct.
Even now, after half a decade in the public eye, with congressional testimony, university professorships and federal agency advisory roles, Whittaker still maintains a firm grip on privacy.
It’s not uncommon for business leaders to politely deflect the question when asked about their salary for the resume that accompanies these interviews, for example. It is somewhat less common to flatly refuse to comment on their age and family. “As a privacy advocate, Whittaker does not answer personal questions that could be used to derive her passwords or ‘secret answers’ for her bank verification,” one staffer says after the interview. “She encourages others to follow her example!”
When Whittaker left Google, she shared a memo internally that made it clear that she was committed to working on the ethical deployment of artificial intelligence and organizing a “responsible tech industry.” She said: “It’s clear that Google is not the place for me to continue this work.” This clarity and lack of willingness to compromise led to Signal.
Created in 2017 with $50 million in funding from WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton, the Signal Foundation exists to “protect freedom of expression and enable secure global communications through open source privacy technology.”
In 2018, it took over development of its messaging app, also called Signal, and Whittaker stepped into the newly created role of president in 2022 — just in time to begin defending Signal, and encryption in general, against a wave of attacks from nation states and companies around the world.
Legislation such as the UK’s Online Safety Act (OSA) and the EU’s Child Sexual Exploitation Regulation have included language that could be used to ban or crack private communications, while Meta’s proposals to enable end-to-end encryption for Facebook and Instagram have drawn fierce opposition from politicians such as Priti Patel, who as UK Home Secretary called the plans “disastrous”.
These attacks are nothing new, Whittaker says when we meet observer offices. “You can go right back to 1976 when. [Whitfield] Diffie and [Martin] Hellman was trying to publish a paper that introduced public key cryptography, a technique that allows us to have encrypted communications over the internet that work. There were intelligence services that tried to prevent them.
“In the 1980s, there was deep concern about the idea that the NSA. [US National Security Agency] and GCHQ would lose its monopoly on encryption and end up under the control of arms treaties in the 1990s – these are the “crypto wars”. You couldn’t mail your code to someone in Europe; was considered an export of ammunition.’
But then the enormous push to commercialize the Internet forced a softening—to a degree. “Encryption of transactions was allowed and large companies had to choose exactly what was encrypted. At the same time, the Clinton administration promoted tracking advertising as a business model, so it was incentivized to collect data about your customers in order to sell to them.”
Surveillance has been a “disease” since the very beginning of the Internet, she said, and encryption “profoundly threatens the type of power that is created through these information asymmetries.” All of which means he doesn’t expect the fight to end anytime soon. “I don’t think these arguments are in good faith.” There is a deeper tension here because in the 20 years of development of this metastatic technology industry, we have seen every aspect of our lives become subject to mass surveillance by a handful of companies working with the US government and other “Five Eyes” agencies. collect more tracking data about us than has ever been available to any entity in human history.
“So if we don’t continue to police these little carvings of privacy and eventually expand them — we have to elbow to get a little more space here — I think we’re in for a much bleaker future than we’d like. to be if we can hold that ground and can expand the space for privacy and free communication.”
Criticism of encrypted communications is as old as technology: allowing anyone to talk without the state being able to eavesdrop on their conversations is a godsend for criminals, terrorists and pedophiles around the world.
But Whittaker says few of Signal’s most vocal critics seem consistent in what they care about. “If we really cared about helping children, why are UK schools collapsing? Why have social services only been funded at 7% of what was proposed to fully fund agencies that are on the front line of stopping abuse?
Sometimes criticism is more unexpected. Signal was recently dragged into America’s culture wars after a failed right-wing campaign to oust National Public Radio’s new CEO Katherine Maher, expanded to Signal, where Maher sits on the board. Elon Musk has stepped in, promoting conspiracy theories that the Signal app – which he once promoted – had a “known vulnerability”, in response to claims that the app “may be compromised”.
The allegations were “weapons in a propaganda war to spread misinformation,” says Whittaker. “We see similar lines of disinformation, which often seem designed to push people away from the Signal, associated with the escalation of the Ukrainian conflict. We believe these campaigns are designed to scare people away from Signal to less secure alternatives that may be more susceptible to hacking and interception.”
The same technology that brings criticism to the foundation has made it popular among governments and militaries around the world who need to protect their own conversations from the prying eyes of state hackers and others.
Whittaker sees it as a leveling device – Signal is for everyone.
“The signal either works for everyone or it doesn’t work for anyone. Every military in the world uses Signal, every politician I know of uses Signal. Every CEO I know uses Signal because anyone who has something truly confidential to communicate recognizes that storing it in a metadata base or hidden on some Google server is not a good practice.”
Whittaker’s vision is unique and unobtrusive. Despite her interest in artificial intelligence, she fears its combination with Signal and criticizes apps such as Meta’s WhatsApp that have introduced AI features.
“I’m really proud that we don’t have an AI strategy. Would we have to look ourselves in the face and say where is the data coming from to train the models, where is the input data coming from? How did we get an AI strategy when our entire focus is on protecting privacy and not tracking people?
Whatever the future holds in terms of technology and political attitudes toward privacy, Whittaker is adamant that its principles are an existential issue.
“We will hold the line correctly. We would rather fold as a functioning company than undermine or remove the privacy guarantees we provide to people.”
curriculum vitae
Age No comment.
Family No comment.
Education Before joining Google in 2006, I studied literature and rhetoric at Berkeley, where I learned the rest.
Pay No comment.