Our digital activity, including our most private interactions and conversations, is constantly monitored and tracked. For Meredith Whittaker, president of Signal, this is a break from human communication throughout history, and it is neither necessary nor necessary. Recorded live at the 2024 Masters of Scale Summit in San Francisco, Whittaker tackles digital surveillance, trust, and privacy, and what the Bic pen has to do with it all.
This is an abbreviated transcript of the interview Quick Responseowned by Robert Safian, former editor-in-chief of Fast company. From the team behind the Masters of Scale podcast, Quick Response features direct interviews with today’s top business leaders navigating real-time challenges. Subscribe to Quick Response wherever you get your podcasts to make sure you don’t miss an episode.
One of the biggest questions facing our global society, and a key element of technology platforms, is about the interplay between trust and privacy and surveillance—governments and companies tracking our digital activity. Can you explain what Signal is, its mission, and philosophy?
For hundreds of thousands of years of human history, the norm of communication with other people, the people we love, the people we interacted with, and our world, was privacy. You know, we’re walking down the street, we’re having a conversation. We don’t think it’s going into a specific Mountain View company website.
We think that’s temporary and then, you know, if I change my mind, you probably don’t have a record of that to show up in 12 years, right? 14 years. Now, the Internet has clearly placed network computing at the center of human communication. And now it is common that almost everything we do, where we are, who we talk to, what we buy is not private.
The signal exists to maintain that practice of private, intimate communication. against a, a trend that has really come into play in the last 20, 30 years without, I believe, the clear consent of the public that a few private companies somehow have access to more intimate data and documents about all of us than anyone has ever had. history.
So I think of us as maintaining the status quo that should have really come in a few decades ago, not like this. Being a heterodox actor who bucks the trend.
We all want to avoid surveillance, right? We want to have the freedom to do and be and act as we want. On the other hand, that same freedom can sometimes support bad actors and dangerous activities. Signal is a great resource for persecuted people in many parts of the world. But it was also used by the editors of January 6. What do you think about the trade-off between freedom and bad actors?
Well, I mean, let’s reverse that. The roads were also used by all those players, right? Goods and vices.
There is an analogy that I like. I’m in law. There is a crime committed. I walk into this so-called criminal’s house, and I find a pen, like a Bic pen that they use, and I’m like, oh, this is the tool that they use to write down their crime plans.
I go to Bic Incorporated. I knock on the door and say forgive me, this pen was used to talk about crime. I need you to reverse engineer this pen to tell me everything that has ever been written about it. And, like, the CEO will be like, are you crazy? That’s not how pens work, is it? Go try the many other surveillance tools in your toolbox, the big budget you just got from Eric Adams, whatever it is, do it.
But like, obviously, we’re not going to put a gyroscope in a pen and do it, you have to charge and the OS doesn’t update every year and it doesn’t work, um, because that’s not how pens work. ? So what are we asking here? Are we asking that every single artifact, every tool we touch somehow record our existence?
And who is watching? Because I just saw the president on stage talking about a really bad future. So what exactly are we talking about? Do we just buy this dark story going, because any part of the world where we have the ability to truly communicate privately, as we have for hundreds of millions of years, hundreds of thousands of years, is somehow unacceptable to the nation or the country. corporate services that feel that surveillance is now the norm, even though we haven’t had public approval for any of that, in my opinion.
What it means is that we designed our digital work in a way where it can be tracked.
If we look at the post-World War II investment in computer infrastructure and technology as a command and control infrastructure to try to win the Cold War, right?
Then in the ’90s, there was a form of network computing and this infrastructure was privatized. And even though there were a lot of warnings about privacy, and there’s no mistake here, but there was an understanding back in the ’70s and before that hey, these things are not private.
There was an industry that grew out of that to make money from surveillance. The advertising-supported surveillance industry emerged in the ’90s. There are two decisions that were made in the framework of the Clinton era. One is that there were no restrictions on surveillance, so there was no privacy law.
We still don’t have a federal privacy law in the US And in that ad can be the economic engine of the tech industry. And why are those two things important together? Marketing requires you to know your customer, and how do you know him? Well, you collect data from them. So there’s been an impetus for this kind of surveillance baked into the paradigm we’re talking about that’s not natural at all.
This is not how technology works. See, Signal is rebuilding the stack to show you that we can do it differently. And by the way, that’s all open source. If you want to use it, we can raise that bar, but we need to change these incentives and we need to change the articles of faith about surveillance and privacy and how security is used in the type of secret work while ensuring centralized surveillance in a way that is often non-critical.
How much is Signal as a platform to fix these problems versus being a platform to make it the way we work around the world?
I think we need to do both.
In the middle of the night, if something goes off, I have to call someone, right? And I have to make sure they call Amazon to find out why the API just went dark. And of course, we’re concerned about people relying on Signal in some part of the world where we’re confined, right?
In a sense, theory needs to be taken from this practice, and practice needs to be informed by theory, and that is Praxis. That’s part of what Signal does. And it shows: the keystone species in the tech ecosystem. Kind of set that bar to private and say again, this is not natural.
This is a product of a particular economic system, a particular set of motivations, a particular narrative and history. You know the flow of the world, but we can change it. We can build differently.
Signal is a non-profit organization, and we are non-profit because we don’t want to be driven by those incentives that prioritize surveillance as a way to raise money that we don’t think is safe in this ecosystem.
We are also trying to change the ecosystem. We don’t want to be the only pine tree in the desert. We want to use the name of my friend Maria and Robin, repeat that desert to grow more pine trees.
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