We can't live a full, dignified life with the ability to question authority, to test ideas, to blow off steam if we don't have private communication. You can't do military strategy. You can't do human rights work. You can't do journalism. Full stop.
Meredith Whittaker, tech boss and defender of privacy. I got the impression that by the end of your time at Google, you were kind of a thorn in management's side.
It wasn't Meredith versus Google. There is a groundswell of sentiment within tech and outside of tech that is concerned with how do we make sure that we are collectively governing this powerful technology so that those who would do harm with it aren't those who are in control.
From Bloomberg Weekend, this is The Mishal Husain Show.
From social media bans to AI and military strikes and the destruction of jobs, debates about tech are all around us, every day. I am old enough to remember the nineties and the emergence of the companies that today we call Big Tech. Back then they were largely seen as benign. They were full of exciting features that would connect us to people around the world and they were free to access. Today, of course, the picture is much more complex, but even so, how many of us really think hard enough about how we use tech, the products we choose and what those companies get out of us. Well, this conversation is with Meredith Whittaker, a tech boss who is different from her peers, partly because her product, the messaging app Signal is a nonprofit and also because it has a deep, and she says, unshakeable promise to barely collect your data, let alone sell it. If you are not a user of Signal, but you know you've heard about it somewhere, it's probably because of the moment last year when the then US National Security Advisor added a journalist to what should have been a classified group chat about military action in Yemen. It became known as 'Signalgate', so that's some of the background, but as Meredith Whittaker came into this studio, there was a live issue in the UK, the government's plans to make it impossible for under eighteens to take or share nude images on their phones. She's got views on the principle of that and on how workable it is, as you'll hear. But I had questions too on whether everyone has the right to be private. What about crime, abuse, terrorism? Your views and questions are welcome on this, by the way. The email is
[email protected] and the broader context is as ever in the illustrated, written version of this, which you can read at bloomberg.com/mishal. Ultimately, I hope you find this conversation as compelling as I did because Meredith Whittaker is able to see the irony in her world to bring out the moments of humor as well as make us think.
Meredith, I guess I would just love to start by asking about your own journey towards what you do now, because you worked in big tech at Google for more than a decade. Was there a moment in that period where you really started to think differently about privacy and data? A moment you can identify that's kind of critical in the development of your story?
I have considered that question. Is there a point where you tripped over something or a revelation happened? You know, Athena birthed from the forehead of Zeus and suddenly there's insight. I don't think it was a moment. I come out of a non-traditional background for somebody working in the tech industry. I studied literature, I studied rhetoric. I was always an arts kid and that's still where I as a human being really live. I love it, and so I was calibrated to perhaps ask different questions or just pursue different inquiries, but I think it was over time beginning to understand Google's business models, the political economic forces that were animating the company after coming in as basically a novice. I did not pursue computer science in school. I was not interested in tech. I did not get a Commodore 64 when I was a kid and everything took off from there and I loved computers, right, you know the classic origin story. And so I had to ask really, really fundamental questions. Like, what is a server?
Would I be right in thinking of you as a bit of a contrarian or maybe a rebel? I know that there was a key moment in your time at Google where you organized colleagues against a Pentagon contract that you realized was being signed.
I wouldn't adopt those terms myself. I am somebody who thinks it's really important to maintain the dignity of my analysis. If something is true, if there is empirical evidence supporting a conclusion, if we can look at the map and clearly see that there's a problem on the road ahead, then I am not somebody who's going to go along to get along with a convenient delusion. Those things, once I see them, I'm not going to veer away or pretend that they don't exist, even if I have to take steps that might be scary or against the grain to do that.
Right, I got the impression that by the end of your time at Google, you were kind of a thorn in management's side. You were organizing walkouts on other issues, ethics issues, and they saw you as a problem.
Well, people who would like to put the goals of infinite growth, infinite revenue, profit above the reality of the harms or the problems or the choppy seas on the road ahead, don't like people who point that out. But I do want to sort of frame that it wasn't Meredith versus Google. This was a groundswell from thousands of people within the company.
Yeah, the walkouts at the time where people came out in big numbers too.
We see that echoed today. DeepMind employees just unionized, concerned about the application of that technology for harmful purposes. You have OpenAI employees beginning to organize or that's being reported in preparation for the IPO. There is a groundswell of sentiment within tech now and outside of tech that is concerned with the fundamental question that I don't think can be avoided by anyone. How do we make sure that we are collectively governing this powerful technology so that those who would do harm with it aren't those who are in control? How do we scrutinize it? How do we put guardrails on it? How do we determine where it's used, where it's not used, how it's developed and what the goals of that development are? Those are fundamental questions that every world leader, every government, every community considering a data center needs to be looking at and where the leverage for governance, where that fulcrum exists is an open question given the bipolar tech world we live in and the volatile geopolitical environment we're in.
And the fact that the tech world seems to be becoming ever more powerful, not least with the amount of interest in the IPOs.
I want to take a moment to really understand what you do at Signal. The core promise is end to end encryption, which means only the sender or receiver can see the actual content of the messages. So how is that different from WhatsApp which also has the same promise?
Well, the core promise of Signal is that in the digital world where almost every micro action is surveilled, turned into data, processed in models, sold to advertisers, sold to data brokers, et cetera, et cetera, we preserve the fundamental human right to private communication, full stop. Which has existed for hundreds of thousands of years. That was the norm. If you and I are talking, that conversation is gone once we are done talking and part ways and we have moved into a world where that ground has shifted dramatically out from under us and that is no longer true. And we think that, you know, it is considered a fundamental human right for a very good reason. We can't live a full, dignified life with the ability to question authority, to have different relationships with people, to test ideas, to blow off steam if we don't have private communication. You can't do military strategy, you can't do human rights work, you can't do journalism, full stop. So Signal provides that in as robust a way as we can. We developed the encryption protocol, the Signal protocol that moved the field forward in 2013. We introduced that to the world and that is the core of our offering that protects the message content on Signal. What you send only goes between sender and receiver. Only the people you're talking to know it. WhatsApp licenses that protocol from us and they also apply it to many of their messages that are sent. WhatsApp for business is excluded from this in many cases, but they protect message content, so what you type, what you say is end-to-end encrypted. They can't see it, only the sender and receiver. However, you have to look at privacy beyond simply the message content, and this is where there are very fundamental differences between WhatsApp and Signal. Signal also applies encryption to protect what is called metadata, but that is extremely intimate. It's extremely revealing data. It's your profile photo, your name, who you talk to, when you talk to them, who's in your groups, how often you chat, when did you text your oncologist, when did you text your therapist, when did you text your lawyer, when did you text someone or your best friend, all of that information. So WhatsApp does collect that. We don't, we go out of our way to collect as close to no data as possible and we make that open source.
Is it really that revealing the other data, the message data? If someone can see that I wake up at six in the morning and I send a lot of messages at that time and they might even know who I'm messaging, my mother, my colleagues or people in other time zones, is that really so revealing of me?
Oh, it absolutely can be. Are you messaging your FBI contacts because you want to be a source? Are you messaging a whistleblower attorney because you found corruption in your workplace and want to report that? Are you messaging a divorce lawyer? Are you messaging an oncologist?
Yeah, but what I mean is again, it's like WhatsApp for example could see, oh, that other person is an oncologist or that other person is in law enforcement or is a source. But again, they can't see beyond that what the actual content is that I'm saying.
Well, no, assuming that's not on WhatsApp for business. However, I think we have to expand beyond simply the application and look at WhatsApp being owned by Meta, the parent company. Meta is a massive data collecting entity. Surveillance advertising is the heart of their business model, so, okay, you messaged your oncologist. Alright, let's join that data with all of the other data we have in hand. We buy credit data from data brokers, we have Facebook data, we have Instagram data, and we have powerful AI models that can find patterns and search across this data.
So I might see ads for cancer drugs on Instagram. Is that what you are suggesting? Because surveillance advertising is a very inflammatory way to put it.
Well, I mean it's a technical descriptor, right? It's targeted advertising based on the collection of data that reveals or purportedly reveals certain qualities of you. Let's take another example. You're messaging a whistleblower attorney and it's very high risk, and the corruption that you found is extreme. So they know, okay, this is Whistleblower Aid, an organization that helps with that. Okay, it started messaging now, okay, this is the contact, okay, well what could they do with that? What could they reveal? Could that be subpoenaed? Could that be revealed to your employer? The fundamental answer is that yes, this data is extremely revealing. It reveals patterns about you. We could hypothesize, but we know already that there's a woman who went to jail in the US because Meta turned over DMs on Facebook Messenger between her and her daughter that showed her helping her daughter access and deal with the aftermath of reproductive care in the state of Nebraska.
Do you find it frustrating then when you see people not care about their privacy? Some people wouldn't even be aware, but people who are aware, but just think this is the price I pay for these platforms being free at the point of use or maybe younger people especially who just think that there's nothing really in their life that they would mind being in the public domain.
Yeah, I find it frustrating when the argument that no one cares about privacy is leveraged by these firms to justify what they're doing. I don't actually find it frustrating when people who really in my view have little choice say, hey, I can't do anything about this. I'm going to delete that from my long list of worries because I don't feel that I am empowered to act on this. I actually don't believe that people don't care about privacy, but I believe that the stakes are very obscure and we're all living in a world where we have dishes to do. We have bills to pay, we have things that are right on our doorstep to deal with and thinking about data flows and privacy legislation is probably pretty far down on our list of concerns.
You had two big moments in the growth of Signal, both of which I remember. 2013, when Edward Snowden used it and trusted it to talk to journalists about US government surveillance and the second was 'Signalgate' last year when a journalist was added to a supposedly highly classified Trump administration discussion on military action. When the second happened, what did you think? This is a great advertisement for Signal because it's secure enough for the US government or...
I thought, whoa, what's going on this morning? This is an interesting story. The article hit my feed the same time it hit anyone else's feed and I think I had to read it twice to really let it sink in because it read almost like a telenovela. What I didn't anticipate after reading it initially was that Signal would become a main character and that it would become a story about Signal. And what I was primarily concerned about is that suddenly Signal was being reported on, spoken about by millions of people who weren't familiar with the intricacies of encrypted messaging or the technology itself, and I wanted to prevent misinformation that could hinder Signal or misinform people who often need to choose Signal in life or death consequences.
Because this was essentially about human frailty, someone who shouldn't have been added to that chat being added. And your worry was that it would make it look like Signal itself was insecure?
Yeah, it would be framed as a problem with Signal or a problem with privacy or... you know that was a very volatile, very heightened news cycle. So how that would turn out was not clear. But yes, I mean this was ultimately men's thumbs doing things that is not something an application developer can take responsibility for.
It turned out well for us. We saw growth across the US, across the world and we've seen pretty steady growth since then.
Can I ask you Meredith, how you reconcile yourself with where your product is being used by people to do harm to others and particularly the example of child sexual abuse, am I right in thinking that if paedophiles, abusers are using Signal to circulate images of child sexual abuse that can happen without them fearing that you will hand over data to law enforcement?
We go out of our way to not be a social media company, so we could pump our numbers fairly easily if we added things like broadcast channels or features that allowed you to find people with similar interests and you meet strangers on Signal, but Signal has made a very conscientious choice to stay in our narrow lane as an interpersonal communications app, which means you have to encounter the person you're talking to in some capacity that is not a viral find a friend feed.
Yeah, that's outside the app essentially.
But once you do find that person, you can be sure that anything you share with them is free from outside surveillance?
Yeah, that is Signal's promise. We are open source. We are... people audit our code regularly. We have the open source community looking at our code. We cannot collect that data, we cannot turn that data over and look, we limit the features that allow virality. We limit the features that allow mass distribution and we do that very conscientiously. I also need to make a fundamental point that is simply true, that encryption either works for everyone or it works for no one. There is no way to have a golden key or a special backdoor or access just for the good guys.
And do you ever struggle with that knowing that there will be people who are using it for the most abusive possible images of children who are on Signal right now? Like, are there moments where you find that hard to reconcile or come to terms with yourself?
The fact of child sexual abuse is horrifying to me. Absolutely, and I think we need to take that so seriously as a society that needs to get much, much better with looking gnarly problems in the face and actually tackling them. But I also struggle with the persistent focus on privacy as the purported barrier to solving these issues when we have most of the Epstein list walking around without consequences, when we have so few mechanisms to actually help children when they report a powerful figure in their community, when we are defunding the actual law enforcement officers who take this data, act on this data, move to prosecute the uncles, the fathers, the pastors who are perpetrating this abuse.
Can I give you the example in the UK where many people would think you have to use every tool in the box. So you have to use the levers you are pointing to and perhaps you have to use the levers in tech as well. So the UK government is moving towards making it compulsory for tech companies to ensure that children can't take or share nude images through their platforms. Is that workable do you think? And if the UK compelled that, what would it mean for your presence here?
Well, I'll start by saying there's never been more data accessible to law enforcement than there is now. That were law enforcement well funded, were social services well funded they could act on and often don't, often delay or often simply don't have the capacity. So when we talk about every tool in the toolbox, we need to recognize that there are some tools that are not being picked up and there are some tools that seem an obsessive focus of politicians who like to abstract these very difficult problems into the technical domain and pretend there is one technical fix they can apply to solve a problem that needs a social solution.
But let's imagine this is one of many. What do you think of it?
As a policy proposal? What do I think of mass scanning of devices that would be age gated? We put out a statement. Keir Starmer announced what seems to be a fairly hasty proposal to implement nudity scanning as a mandatory feature on all devices that would be sold or used in the UK and that you could only opt out of this nudity scanning if you provided some sort of verification that you were above a certain age threshold.
There are very few technical details on that system, but our position and our position on the client side scanning debate that circled the online safety bill as well, now act, is that this constitutes very dangerous mass surveillance. That having a scanning system on your device that is going to purportedly detect nudity can easily be weaponized by governments for political speech, for other content and that we don't understand the technical mechanism by which this would be implemented because my assumption is there is no specification for this, but that we would be looking at a system that would likely phone home, so that's sending that data to governments, to tech companies and ultimately comprise a mass surveillance system of permitted speech that would be implemented across everyone's device and pose real threats to Signal's ability to provide the robust privacy guarantees that militaries, governments, Ukraine, human rights workers, journalists, people around the world rely on often for life or death.
With all of the big brains in tech, you really don't think it's possible to refine the product in a way that protects children and does the age verification and the certain kinds of images without it having these massive repercussions and implications that you are describing?
Well, part of being a big brain in tech I think is really understanding the nature and the limits of what technology can do. And this isn't a question of go think harder nerds. There are real limits to what tech can and can't do. I think tech's coming up with new things all the time. Their marketing departments are talking about it all the time, but if you look at the implementation layer, often what you're looking at is sticky tape and twine in a handful of legacy libraries that may or may not be suitable for purpose. The limits of your software, the limits of the memory that's running on your hardware, these are fundamental material limitations and there is no technology that has been shown to do this in a way that is robust and safe.
Yeah, I also just wondered whether how sustainable your position is. I hear what you are saying, but it's not only the UK government that's really concerned on this front. The EU also had temporary legislation which just ran out, but it was essentially asking tech companies to voluntarily scan their platforms.
And we've taken the same position on that.
This does seem to be the way that governments are going and if it is, can you imagine Signal not being available in the UK or the EU? You threatened to walk over the online safety bill as it was then in the UK?
Look, we don't really do PR. We have a position and our position is we would rather exit a market than undermine the technical guarantees that people trust for their privacy. That doesn't change based on jurisdiction, it doesn't change based on year and that's not something we take lightly. We're not just flexing or being recalcitrant. That is recognizing that encryption requires a network effect that a backdoor in any market compromises a door into Signal that would be weaponized by nation state adversaries. Signal is the only mass communications platform that provides the level of privacy that we provide and we know that we have adversaries that are consistently searching for vulnerabilities in our code.
Who do we mean? Any government with a capable intelligence agency is spending some of that effort looking at Signal.
Including your own government in the US?
I don't have clearance to know that for sure.
