Whittaker

“How Signal Revolutionized Its Architecture for Enhanced Privacy: An Inside Look into the Latest Update”

Meredith Whittaker 3
Adding usernames to a messaging app may seem like a standard feature, but for Signal, such identifiers were anathema to its mission of total privacy and security — until now. The new feature sounds simple: you register a username and that appears instead of your phone number. But why do this at all when everyone already has contact names, and Signal is totally private anyway? That is not just happening in India, we’re seeing a number of jurisdictions where to obtain a phone number, you are required to provide more and more personal information. But it replaces the phone number when you go to initiate contact.” (Signal does append numbers to chosen usernames to ensure they are unique.)

“Parochial, Magic-Driven Thinking: Signal’s Meredith Whittaker Denounces Anti-Encryption Efforts”

Meredith Whittaker 1
AI is “not open in any sense,” the battle over encryption is far from won, and Signal’s principled (and uncompromising) approach may complicate interoperability efforts, warned the company’s president, Meredith Whittaker. “The overall theme I’m seeing is a deep desire for accountability in tech, which we saw sort of animated mid-2010s. That, then, has been weaponized; and I think we’re seeing surveillance wine in accountability bottles,” she said. It’s a form of, again, parochial, magical thinking here,” said Whittaker. But then Google published a couple of days later, like Microsoft is actually the monopoly because it has the OpenAI and sort of the Azure monopoly, right?