Meredith Whittaker, former Google Director is now the president of Signal. (Florian Hetz for The Washington Post via Getty Images)
Florian Hetzt | Washington Post | beautiful pictures
Meredith Whittaker takes on leading role at Signal organization last year, moving into the nonprofit world after a career in academia, government work, and the tech industry.
She is currently the president of an organization that runs one of the world’s most popular encrypted messaging apps, with tens of millions of people using the app to keep their chats private. private and out of the reach of big tech companies.
Whittaker has real-world reasons to be skeptical of for-profit companies and their use of data – she previously spent 13 years at Google.
After working for more than a decade at the search giant, in 2017 she learned from a friend that Google’s cloud computing unit was working on a controversial contract with the Department of Defense called Project maven. She and other workers consider it hypocritical for Google to work on artificial intelligence technology that could potentially be used for drone warfare. They began discussing collective action against the company.
“People get together every week, talk about organizing,” Whittaker said in an interview with CNBC, set as Women History Month. “There was a kind of sense in the company that didn’t exist before.”
When tensions were high, Google employees later learned that the company report paid former chief executive Andy Rubin a $90 million exit package despite credible sexual misconduct allegations against the Android founder.
Whittaker helped organize a meeting take a walk against the company, bringing thousands of Google employees to demand more transparency and an end forced arbitration for tenants. The walkout represents a historic moment in the tech industry, which, until then, has had few well-known instances of employee activism.
“Let me rest,” Whittaker said of Rubin’s revelations and the strike that followed. “Everybody knows; the whispering network no longer whispers.”
Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Whittaker left Google in 2019 to return full-time to the AI Now Institute at New York University, an organization she co-founded in 2017 that says its mission is “to help ensure that AI systems have accountability to the community and the context in which they “re-apply.”
Whittaker never intended to pursue a career in technology. She studied rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley. She said she was broke and needed a gig when she joined Google in 2006, after submitting a profile on Monster.com. Eventually, she got a temporary job in customer support.
“I remember the moment someone explained to me that a server is a different kind of computer,” says Whittaker. “At the time, we didn’t live in a world where every kid was learning to code – that knowledge wasn’t saturated yet.”
‘Why do we have free juice?’
In addition to learning about technology, Whittaker also had to adapt to the culture of the industry. At companies like Google at the time, that meant lavish perks and lots of indulgence.
“Part of it is trying to figure out why we’re getting free juice?” Whittaker said. “That’s foreign to me because I didn’t grow up rich.”
Whittaker said she will “learn more absorbent” about the technology sector and Google’s role in it by observing and asking questions. When told about Google’s mission to index the world’s information, she remembers that it sounded relatively simple even though it involved a multitude of complex issues that touched upon concerns about the world. political, economic and social.
“Why is Google so aggressive about net neutrality?” Whittaker said, referring to the company’s battle to ensure that internet service providers provide equal access to content delivery.
Some European telecommunications providers are now call on the regulator to require tech companies to pay them “fair share” fees, while the tech industry said those costs represent an “internet tax” that unjustly burdens them.
“I think I learned at the same time the nuances of technology as well as political and economic issues,” says Whittaker. “Now I understand the difference between what we’re saying publicly and how that might work internally.”
At Signal, Whittaker can focus on the task without worrying about sales. Signal has gained popularity among journalists, researchers, and activists because of its ability to scramble messages so that communications cannot be intercepted by third parties.
As a nonprofit, Whittaker says that Signal is “existentially important” to society and that there is no fundamental financial incentive for the app to deviate from its stated position of protecting related information. private contact.
“Sometimes we try to spend more money and more time making sure we have as little data as possible,” says Whittaker. “We don’t know who’s talking to whom, we don’t know who you are, we don’t know your profile picture or who’s in the group you’re talking to.”
Tesla CEO and Twitter Elon Musk praised Signal as a direct messaging tool and tweeted in November that “Twitter DM’s goal is to replace Signal.”
Musk and Whittaker share some concerns about companies profiting from AI technology. Musk was an early supporter of OpenAI, creator of ChatGPT, founded as a non-profit. But he said in a recent tweet that it has become a “maximum profit company effectively controlled by Microsoft.” In January, Microsoft announce a invest billions of dollars in OpenAI, the company calls itself a “limited profit” company.
In addition to OpenAI’s confusing structure, Whittaker was heavily advertised for ChatGPT. Google recently jumped into the general AI market, launching a chatbot called Bard.
Whittaker said she sees little value in the technology and struggles to see any game-changing use. Eventually, the excitement will subside, though “maybe not as quickly as Web3 or something,” she said.
“It doesn’t make any sense,” Whittaker said of ChatGPT and similar tools. “It predicts what is likely to be the next word in a sentence.”
OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
She is concerned that companies could use AI software to “justify the degradation of people’s work”, leading to writers, editors and content producers losing their careers. their. And she certainly wants everyone to know that Signal has absolutely no plans to incorporate ChatGPT into its service.
“On file, as loud as you can, no!” Whittaker said.
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