Meredith Whittaker, president of the Signal Foundation, joined TechCrunch Senior Reporter Devin Coldewy for a conversation about the threats facing Signal and its mission: protect free expression and enable secure global communication through open-source privacy technology. They talk about legislation and privacy, interconnection standards, meta-data encryption, how Signal beat Apple in raising the bar on encryption, and why NVIDIA is a “giant, core dependency” for the AI industry.
Whittaker often expressed her concerns about AI as a surveillance technology. She argues that the generative AI industry is heavily dominated and controlled by a few Big Tech companies, such as Microsoft, Amazon, and Google. This concentration of power poses significant threats to competition, democracy, culture, and individual agency. Whittaker hopes for robust regulatory interventions to increase transparency, and accountability, and to break the monopolistic hold of these companies on the AI market.