Asked about the privacy impact of chatbots like ChatGPT and Claude, Signal president Meredith Whittaker said: “These are not your friends. They are not sentient beings. They are not sentient interlocutors.”
Whittaker made these comments More extensive interview with Bloomberg about policy, privacy and Signaling. He admitted to using AI tools “to format a document here and there” but insisted: “I don’t question them. I take my thinking and my writing very seriously, and I don’t want the process of working on an idea (…) to be hijacked or captured by a system that averages what’s already there.”
As for the Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman’s prediction Whittaker, who said users could let Microsoft Copilot handle all their Christmas shopping this year, argued that this scenario – where Copilot listens to a family group conversation to determine who wants it – would mean giving it “my credit card, my browser, my Sigl, the ability to text my siblings on my behalf, my home address (and) my calendar.”
“What you just described is a system with very common access across many applications and services,” Whittaker said. “In the context of signaling, it would constitute a kind of backdoor.”
