Notices by Meredith Whittaker (mer__edith@mastodon.world)

Yes, I did sound the alarm on agentic AI's privacy threat, and rightly so.

https://observer.com/2025/07/signal-meredith-whittaker-agentic-ai-risk/

A big humble thank you to @time and @perrigo for featuring Signal and me in your roundup of 2025’s most influential companies. An honor to serve alongside an incredible group of people backed by a rad movement ❤️

https://time.com/collections/time100-companies-2025/7289620/signal/

'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 ❤️

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jun/18/whatsapp-ai-helper-mistakenly-shares-users-number

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

Happy pride month! Especially to my trans friends <3

📣 The rushed integration of AI into everything is a major threat to privacy, as we've been saying.

Microsoft Recall is a great (not great!) example of exactly why--it screenshots everything on your desktop, to give AI the data to tell you...what you were doing on desktop.

So, Signal took steps to protect you and everyone using Signal on Windows 11 from Recall's hunger for (Signal) data.

Read more about how we navigated, and why we need to ecosystem to a lot more 👇

https://signal.org/blog/signal-doesnt-recall/

I did. Because it does.

https://techcrunch.com/2025/03/07/signal-president-meredith-whittaker-calls-out-agentic-ai-as-having-profound-security-and-privacy-issues/

@brayd @signalapp We will never weaken encryption, add a backdoor, bow or scrape, etc. We would rather shut down or leave a market. Our position does not change based on jurisdiction.

Not lost on me that it's nonprofit tech, https://app.watchduty.org, showing up & actually working in the midst of the LA fires (donate to them!)

Meanwhile platforms fail to surface key news, vital info is paywalled...

As I've been saying, we need a new tech paradigm, yesterday!

This is desperate product manager trying to ship something to meet a company OKR they don't understand and don't believe in coded

https://www.404media.co/instagram-begins-randomly-showing-users-ai-generated-images-of-themselves/

@_dm Why do you assume this?

@_dm Arguably fake users making fake content we click on, that clicks on us, is fraudulent traffic. And allegations of funny accounting, boring on/constituting fraud have been leveled at Meta for years. Since Meta owns the 'data' and the process of creating it, with almost no accountability, it's not clear to me that this is a bright line that won't be (hasn't already been) crossed.

Meta making fake AI bot users is tedious, death drive-coded AI desperation

That aside, the Q I want answered is how fake 'users' will be (dis)counted when calculating ad clicks, auction prices? You know, the already sketchy pseudoscience on which the surveillance biz model house o' cards rests...

Complete knowledge of the full majesty of universal creation in all its divine facets is when I own an island.

@MrBerard @CCC Quite seriously, I would never. I write (to paraphrase Didion) to know what I think, and I accept talks at venues I respect whose thinking I want to engage with in order to have deadlines that help me move forward with certain inquiries. I would NEVER schlepp myself to Hamburg during the most relaxed time of year to read what a bot wrote at an hour dangerously close to my bedtime!

Sitting at the dining table, busy condensing 60 pages of unruly notes into 15 pages of more or less coherent text for my upcoming talk at @CCC.

Every so often I glance up from my computer on this, Christmas Eve, and catch the eye of a family member whose suspicious gaze lets me know that they still don't quite believe that there is in fact a real conference, attended by real people like me, scheduled on Dec 27th.

🛑🤡 PSA: This is disingenuous marketing. Signal chats can't be 'monitored' by anyone not in those chats.

Dressing up "joining groups via publicly posted links, then exfiltrating group data" as an offensive 'cybercapability' borders on misinfo, and confuses/scares ppl who rely on Signal for robust privacy.

https://intel471.com/blog/expanding-source-coverage-adding-signal-chats-to-threat-intelligence

@eighthave eh, I mean...read the long thread of comments and you'll see many people who disagree. A shitty culture in general isn't erased by a subset of kind people operating within that culture.

📢NEW: 'Open' AI systems aren't open. The vague term, combined w AI hype is (mis)shaping policy & practice, assuming 'open source' AI democratizes access & addresses power concentration. It doesn't.

@sarahbmyers, @davidthewid & I correct the record👇
https://nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08141-1