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meredithmeredith.bsky.social
President of Signal, Chief Advisor to AI Now Institute
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Worth a watch: Head of Signal, Meredith Whittaker, on so-called "agentic AI" and the difference between how it's described in the marketing and what access and control it would actually require to work as advertised.

Hype, Sustainability, and the Price of the Bigger-is-Better Paradigm in AI arxiv.org/abs/2409.14160 #artificialintelligence #ethics #sustainability #hype

I'm in #FAccT2025 next week. Psyched for my first @facct.bsky.social conference. HMU if you want to meet. We'll be presenting our paper "Hype, Sustainability, and the Price of the Bigger-is-Better Paradigm in AI" with @sashamtl.bsky.social & @meredithmeredith.bsky.social arxiv.org/abs/2409.14160

'Meredith,' some guys ask, 'why won't you shove AI into Signal?' Because we love privacy, and we love you, and this shit is predictable and unacceptable. Use Signal ❤️

The Minnesota shooter apparently used data broker websites to find the home addresses of the people he shot and murdered. Congress has had years to do something about data brokers and they've sided with the tech lobby over and over again. Their inaction is deadly.

Use Signal. We promise, no AI clutter, and no surveillance ads, whatever the rest of the industry does. <3

Me and @clarachappaz.bsky.social on @quotidienofficiel.bsky.social agreeing that there's no such thing as a safe backdoor 🤝 (In French) www.tf1.fr/tmc/quotidie...

📣 Introducing Meredith Whittaker, who will be speaking at our upcoming talk on Signal, Surveillance and the Future of AI.

Happy pride month! Especially to my trans friends <3

The Trump administration is working with private companies like Palantir to create detailed reports on every American, which could help them weaponize our personal information in their quest to deport immigrants and punish critics. This is a huge threat to our constitutional rights.

Tomorrow, Thur May 29, Nuits sonores, Lyon France! I'm coming dance, I'm coming to party, I'm coming to eat, but first I'm sitting down to talk about tech, privacy, Signal, and what it takes to make a world worth living in <3

Teaching @meredithmeredith.bsky.social's Steep Cost of Capture this week, and this hits. In 80s, academics organized a boycott of DOD missile shield defense (SDI) contracts. One congressman threatened to cut university funding where profs refused these SDI contracts. papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

The House has passed the GOP's budget bill with the 10-year ban on state AI laws intact. If the provision survives reconciliation in the Senate, the California, Colorado, or any other state that sought to pass laws governing AI would be legally banned from doing so. This is what's behind the bill:

In testimony yesterday before the House Committee on Energy & Commerce, @ambakak.bsky.social spelled out what we have to lose: this moratorium on state AI laws flies in the face of common sense – it sets back the clock and freezes it there.

We're ready for Microsoft Recall and the automatic screenshots it takes of everything on your desktop. Signal Desktop on Windows now includes support for a new "Screen security" feature designed to block screenshots of your Signal chats. signal.org/blog/signal-...

Microsoft is out of control. '“Take a screenshot every few seconds” legitimately sounds like a suggestion from a low-parameter LLM that was given a prompt like “How do I add an arbitrary AI feature to my operating system as quickly as possible in order to make investors happy?”'

📣 The rush to add AI into everything is a big threat to privacy, as we've been saying. MS Recall's screenshotting everything is a (not) great example of exactly why. So, Signal took steps to protect everyone using Signal on Windows 11 from Recall's privacy invasion.👇 signal.org/blog/signal-...

Yes! Hallucinations and sycophancy are not some unintended consequence of AI. They are features, not bugs. If we want to improve things, we need changes in design, governance and incentives, not end-of-pipe fixes.

Signal is secure and private. Understanding the larger issues raised by SignalGatee requires interrogating the surveillance business model. Brilliant work, getting right to the marrow of the issue, from @rondeibert.bsky.social !

I'm going to go through the paper she put online from this talk. Well worth the watch and I encourage anyone to watch this. Meredith Whittaker, CEO of Signal. youtu.be/Gjkpinu_Zco?...

This is inaccurate. There is no known vulnerability with Signal's core tech. The memo was discussing phishing attempts, which Signal has worked to mitigate. And it was hastily reported. It's important not to spread misinfo that can confuse people into moving away from meaningfully private comms.

It's really crucial to understand how badly framed this is. There is no Signal vulnerability. The Pentagon email did a bad job explaining a Google report from a month ago and NPR repeated it. This is like saying because you got a phishing email at your Gmail address, there's a Google vulnerability.

Right now there are a lot of new eyes on Signal, and not all of them are familiar with secure messaging and its nuances. Which means there’s misinfo flying around that might drive people away from Signal and private communications. 1/

WhatsApp voert in NL een PR offensief, omdat er een grote uittocht is naar @signal.org. @meredithmeredith.bsky.social reageert vandaag:

I was so impressed by this @sxsw.com keynote interview with @meredithmeredith.bsky.social, President of Signal and Board Member of the Signal Foundation, and @guykawasaki.bsky.social. Who watched it? Who uses @signal.org? I'm curious! #Leadership #Innovation #PrivacyMatters #SignalApp

The need for privacy is universal — even the most ordinary moments remind us of its importance; "we all close the bathroom door". @meredithmeredith.bsky.social’s stance on privacy is reassuring, and Signal exemplifies this principle through its entire strategic posture.

“Many forms of the activity of struggle,/ which we do not ordinarily consider as games,/ have a great deal of light thrown on them by the theory of game-playing machines./ One interesting example is the fight between a mongoose & a snake.” Standalone surrealist poem, from Wiener’s Cybernetics

The best way for an organisation to truly protect the data of its users is to not have it. Earlier this month at @sxsw.com, @meredithmeredith.bsky.social explained why it really matters and how it is done at @signal.org. 👉🏾 www.youtube.com/live/AyH7zoP... Instructive and inspiring, right?