(C) Alec Muffett's DropSafe blog.
Author Name: Alec Muffett
This story was originally published on allecmuffett.com. [1]
License: CC-BY-SA 3.0.[2]
Signal Is More Than Encrypted Messaging. Under Meredith Whittaker, It’s Out to Prove Surveillance Capitalism Wrong
2024-08-28 10:00:00+00:00
ten years ago, WIRED published a news story about how two little-known, slightly ramshackle encryption apps called RedPhone and TextSecure were merging to form something called Signal. Since that July in 2014, Signal has transformed from a cypherpunk curiosity—created by an anarchist coder, run by a scrappy team working in a single room in San Francisco, spread word-of-mouth by hackers competing for paranoia points—into a full-blown, mainstream, encrypted communications phenomenon. Hundreds of millions of people have now downloaded Signal. (Including Drake: “Cuban girl, her family grind coffee,” he rapped in his 2022 song “Major Distribution.” “Text me on the Signal, don’t call me.”) Billions more use Signal’s encryption protocols integrated into platforms like WhatsApp.
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That origin story is, perhaps, a startup cliché. But Signal is, in many ways, the exact opposite of the Silicon Valley model. It’s a nonprofit that has never taken investment, makes its product available for free, has no advertisements, and collects virtually no information on its users—while competing with tech giants and winning. In a world where Elon Musk seems to have proven that practically no privately owned communication forum is immune from a single rich person’s whims, Signal stands as a counterfactual: evidence that venture capitalism and surveillance capitalism—hell, capitalism, period—are not the only paths forward for the future of technology.
Over its past decade, no leader of Signal has embodied that iconoclasm as visibly as Meredith Whittaker. Signal’s president since 2022 is one of the world’s most prominent tech critics: When she worked at Google, she led walkouts to protest its discriminatory practices and spoke out against its military contracts. She cofounded the AI Now Institute to address ethical implications of artificial intelligence and has become a leading voice for the notion that AI and surveillance are inherently intertwined. Since she took on the presidency at the Signal Foundation, she has come to see her central task as working to find a long-term taproot of funding to keep Signal alive for decades to come—with zero compromises or corporate entanglements—so it can serve as a model for an entirely new kind of tech ecosystem.
Whittaker has been based in Paris for the summer, but I met up with her during a quick visit to her home city of New York. In a Brooklyn café, we ended up delving deepest into a subject that, as outspoken as the privacy exec may be, she rarely speaks about: herself, and her strange path from Google manager to Silicon Valley gadfly.
Andy Greenberg: Is it OK to say here that we had planned to talk on the actual 10th anniversary of Signal but had to reschedule because you were hospitalized with food poisoning?
Meredith Whittaker: Yeah, that’s fine.
OK. So you’re not quite a privacy person like [Signal Foundation cofounders] Moxie Marlinspike or Brian Acton …
No, I’m a woman, for one thing.
True! But also, there’s no way that either of them would let me mention something personal like that. They’re much more guarded in the way that they present themselves. It seems like you’re a different kind of leader for Signal.
I think the Venn diagram of our beliefs has some significant overlaps. We all have a clear analysis of surveillance capitalism and the stakes of mass surveillance in the hands of the powerful. But in terms of my personal guardedness around my own life: I am a private person. There’s not that much on the internet about me, because from a young age, I’ve had a fundamental instinct not to tell too much. But I think it comes more from just a long-standing tendency—and thinking about the stakes—than a position of ideological purity.
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[1] URL:
https://www.wired.com/story/meredith-whittaker-signal/
[2] URL:
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
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