Signal’s Meredith Whittaker on Surveillance Capitalism, Text Privacy and AI

On with Kara Swisher

New York Magazine

News Commentary, News, Society & Culture

4.2 • 2.2K Ratings

🗓️ 17 October 2024

⏱️ 69 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

What do cybersecurity experts, journalists in foreign conflicts, indicted New York City Mayor Eric Adams and Drake have in common? They all use the Signal messaging app. Signal’s protocol has been the gold standard in end-to-end encryption, used by Whatsapp, Google and more, for more than a decade. But it’s been under fire from both authoritarian governments and well-meaning democracies who see the privacy locks as a threat. Since 2022, former Google rabble-rouser and AI Now Institute co-founder Meredith Whittaker has been president of the Signal Foundation, the nonprofit that runs the app. Kara talks with Meredith about her fight to protect text privacy, the consolidation of power and money in AI and how nonprofits can survive in a world built on the surveillance economy. Questions? Comments? Email us at [email protected] or find Kara on Threads/Instagram @karaswisher Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Support for the show comes from Into the Mix, a Ben and Jerry's
0:05.2	podcast about Joy and Justice produced with Fox Creative. Former President
0:09.7	Donald Trump has made voter fraud a key talking point in its 2024 presidential
0:14.0	campaign despite having no evidence of widespread fraud. Historically, claims like
0:18.5	this can have a tangible effect on ordinary voters. In a new three-part series host Ashley C. Ford talked to
0:25.0	Olivia Coley Pearson, a civil servant in Douglas Georgia who was arrested for
0:29.4	voter fraud because she showed a first-time voter how the voting machines worked.
0:33.6	Here how she fought back on the latest episode of Into the Mix.
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