Meredith Whittaker on Who Controls Your Data in the Age of AI

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I'm RJ. Decker, a private investigator uncovering the Sunshine State's darkest secrets.

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Episode 386 386 is the area code serving North Central parts of Florida. 1986, Top Gun hit theaters. True story, Tom Cruise is starring in a romantic comedy about body positivity. He and his actress both gained 300 pounds for the roles. The name of the film? Missionary Impossible. Just give it a second.
Welcome to the 386th episode of The Prof G Pod. What's happening in today's episode? We speak with Meredith Whittaker, the president of the Signal Foundation and a leading voice on AI policy. I first came across Meredith at South by Southwest. She was on a panel. I never, I was bored and I walked in. I almost never listened to panels. And I thought, who is this? Who is this strange dark haired woman speaking all sorts of truth and logic about AI? And it ends up she runs the app and I had lunch with her and she struck me as really intelligent. And I have been much more concerned about, for the first time, I don't know if I'm getting older, I'm much more concerned about my own privacy, worried that at some point, all of my AI queries will be made public, right? Is that my prostate? Question mark. Expecting, expecting AI to answer. I'm pretty sure every ailment I have is because of an enlarged prostate. I'm convinced there everything starts with the prostate. Anyways, don't know how I got here. Anyway, she's an incredibly insightful, intelligent person and I would argue probably the most well-liked person or CEO in tech right now, which isn't saying a lot. Very impressive, very intelligent, and sort of signals trying to or is, I think, carving itself out as sort of a clean, well-lit part of the Internet. I'm fascinated with the trade-off between privacy and utility, and we'll speak more about that. Anyways, here's our conversation with Meredith Whittaker.
Meredith, where does this podcast find you?

**Meredith Whittaker** (4:02)
I'm in New York City.

**Scott Galloway** (4:04)
In New York? I thought you lived in Europe.

**Meredith Whittaker** (4:06)
I'm in Europe a lot. I go between Paris and New York. We're a small org. We spread a lot of jurisdictions.

**Scott Galloway** (4:13)
There you go. So let's ride into it. I want to start with the basics. Signal has been in the news a lot this year, and we'll get to that in a moment. We know it's widely used by journalists, public officials, and people who are especially concerned about privacy, but on a practical level, how does Signal actually work and what makes it different from other messaging apps?

**Meredith Whittaker** (4:34)
On a practical level, Signal is the most widely used, actually private, communications platform. If we go out of our way to collect as close to no data as possible, and that's really what sets us apart, because we exist in an ecosystem where for better or for worse, in one way or another, most of the time you make money in tech by collecting and monetizing data. So you collect data about the users of your platform, and then you sell access to different types of users based on that data to advertisers or you collect data and you train your AI model with it, etc. That's the economic engine of tech since the 90s and maybe before. Signal is obsessed with maintaining the human right to communicate privately, and we have built an alternative communications platform that does just that. We end up rewriting core pieces of the proverbial stack to enable us to do what is normal to provide a basic and easily usable messaging platform in a way that does not collect your data and thus does not put us in a position of being forced to turn it over if we get a subpoena, of having a breach expose your most intimate information, of violating the compacts that we make with the people who rely on us. So that's in a nutshell. We're also open source, and open source matters here because that means you don't have to trust me. You don't have to like me. You can actually verify that, yeah, the thing that she or anyone says it does is what it does because we can scrutinize the code.