When questioned about the privacy concerns related to chatbots such as ChatGPT and Claude, Signal President Meredith Whittaker stated, “These are not your friends. These are not conscious beings. These are not sentient interlocutors.”
Whittaker expressed these thoughts in an extensive interview with Bloomberg focusing on policy, privacy, and Signal. She admitted to using AI tools occasionally for document formatting but clarified, “I don’t ask them questions. I’m very serious about my thinking and writing, and I don’t want the process of working through an idea […] to be foreclosed or eclipsed by the response of a system that’s averaging what’s already out there.”
In response to Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman’s forecast that users might rely on Microsoft Copilot for their Christmas shopping this year, Whittaker argued that this scenario — where Copilot listens in on family group chats to gauge preferences — involves granting it “access to my credit card, my browser, my Signal, the ability to message my siblings on my behalf, my home address [and] my calendar.”
“What you’ve just described is a system with very pervasive access across multiple applications and services,” Whittaker remarked. “In the context of Signal, it would constitute a kind of a backdoor.”
