Signal boss: Surveillance 'existential' danger of tech
The mysticism that has allowed tech firms to make billions of dollars from surveillance is finally clearing, the boss of encrypted messaging app Signal told AFP.
Meredith Whittaker, who spent years working for Google before helping to organise a staff walkout in 2018 over working conditions, said tech was "valorised" and "fetishised" when she first began in the industry in 2006.
"The idea that technology represented the apex of innovation and progress was fairly pervasive in government circles and popular culture," she said in an interview on the sidelines of the Web Summit tech conference in Lisbon this week.
But legislators and users were now reckoning with the "well-documented harms of allowing a handful of large corporations have the power to surveil almost every aspect of human life".
She said people were now seeking out apps like Signal because they appreciated the "real existential dangers of placing their most intimate thoughts, their locations, their friend networks in the hands of corporate and state surveillance actors".
Whittaker, who established the AI Now Institute at New York University in 2017 and has advised US government regulators, has emerged as a prominent critic of the business models built on extraction of personal data to use for targeted advertising.
- 'Punching above our weight' -
She became president of Signal two months ago and is pushing hard for the app to become a genuine alternative to the likes of WhatsApp and Apple's iMessage.
"We want to make sure that everyone in the world can pick up their device, quickly open Signal, use it to communicate with anyone else," she said.
The odds are stacked against her firm -- WhatsApp, she says, has around 1,000 engineers and many thousands
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