LISBON —
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.
اضافة اعلان
Meredith Whittaker,
who spent years working for
Google before helping to organize a staff walkout
in 2018 over working conditions, said tech was “valorized” and “fetishized”
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 the 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.
The app is governed by a non-profit organization, the Signal Foundation, and is just beginning to ask users for small donations to keep it going.
“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 of support staff, while her company has just 40 people in total.
The app is governed
by a non-profit organization, the Signal Foundation, and is just beginning to
ask users for small donations to keep it going.
The company’s David
vs Goliath act was laid bare in January when co-founder
Moxie Marlinspike left
his post as CEO, detailing how hard it had been to keep the app going.
“I was writing all
the Android code, was writing all of the server code, was the only person on
call for the service, was facilitating all product development, and was
managing everyone,” he wrote in a blog at the time.
Yet Signal has been
downloaded more than 100 million times, and, although Whittaker will not
confirm the figures, reports last year estimated it has 40 million regular
users.
And she is
undaunted by the task, arguing that having talented staff helps close the gap
with competitors.
“We have a small
team that are extremely competent and yet we’re punching way way above our
weight,” she said.
‘Gold standard’
Signal has
increasing numbers of friends in the pro-privacy sector.
Email services like
Proton, search engine
DuckDuckGo and countless data analytics firms all market
themselves as privacy-focused apps.
And Whittaker
stressed that Signal was producing a “gold standard” open-source encryption
protocol that is used by WhatsApp among others.
But the goal is not
to emulate the other players in the field and push for evermore flashy new
features.
“Our growth
ambitions are not of the same nature as the ambitions of for-profit
surveillance companies,” she said.
The aim instead was
to create a “network effect of encryption”.
That would help to make sure “everyone in the world has the
option of actually communicating privately without being subject to pervasive
surveillance by states and corporations”.
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