Signal’s Meredith Whittaker wants you to remember that AI chatbots ‘are not your friends’

Asked about the privacy implications of chatbots like ChatGPT and Claude, Signal President Meredith Whittaker answered, “These are not your friends. These are not conscious beings. These are not sentient interlocutors.”

Whittaker made those comments in a broader interview with Bloomberg about policy, privacy, and Signal. She acknowledged that she uses AI tools “to format a document here and there,” but insisted, “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.”

As for Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman’s prediction that users could let Microsoft Copilot handle all their Christmas shopping this year, Whittaker argued this scenario — where Copilot is eavesdropping on the family group chat to determine who wants want — means giving 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 said. “In the context of Signal, it would constitute a kind of a backdoor.”