YouSaid · the spoken record

Meredith Whittaker

lines on the record: 94
first: 2022-10-18
most recent: 2022-10-18
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Well, you should definitely check out for look out for the stories update that's in a couple of weeks. We should be rolling out stories which are cute little ephemeral messages that you may be familiar with from other services. But on Signal, they will be fully private and secure. And that's the next big feature launch. And we're all using it inside Signal. We all love it. And it's going to be great when we can actually use it with all of our friends and colleagues on Signal.”
2022-10-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Signal won’t compromise on encryption, with president Meredith Whittaker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Although the people who are using the state of the art messaging encryption system are using the signal protocol, I think what we're talking about also is what our incentives and how are we structured to ensure that we live by our mission and not in the name of profit and growth.”
2022-10-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Signal won’t compromise on encryption, with president Meredith Whittaker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then I think we have to consider the concept of privacy structurally, not just technologically, right? Like people using encryption for a number of things. They still collect data, right? Like, you know, if we're looking at an app that is controlled by Google, it is pretty trivial to join that metadata with a lot of the other wildly intimate and personal data that Google has and sort of make conclusions about people, right? So we need to also look at the organizational and structural differences between a signal and a Google. And Google Signal doesn't have any of that data. We don't buy data from data brokers. We don't scrape data from anywhere. We don't have it. We don't want it. We actually go out of our way, as I just described, to avoid having it or touching it or knowing it, right? So I think that we're talking about a difference in kind and that difference in kind is not just vis-a-vis our technological implementation or whether we're using this variety of end-to-end encryption.”
2022-10-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Signal won’t compromise on encryption, with president Meredith Whittaker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Signal is not just encrypted, right? Like WhatsApp uses the signal protocol to encrypt its messages. Signal doesn't just encrypt the message content, right? It is encrypting metadata. which I consider like fairly revolutionary with its new groups methods and infrastructure, which was figure out a way to prevent signal from knowing who is in a group and who's talking to whom, right? Like these things are huge true scientific innovations that are also innovations in privacy that is sort of signal trying as hard as we can to collect as little information about you, about who you talk to, as little meaningful information about what people are saying, who they're saying to it, who's using our server, et cetera. So, you know, I would need to look at the entire kind of end-to-end infrastructure, what incidental or metadata is being collected.”
2022-10-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Signal won’t compromise on encryption, with president Meredith Whittaker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not at the moment. No. Well, again, I haven't poured over the RCS spec, so I want to be really careful with any flip answers. And I could do that and come back on and we could have a whole conversation about it.”
2022-10-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Signal won’t compromise on encryption, with president Meredith Whittaker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“On Twitter, like pulling up on on-ramp to adoption, right? I'm not happy that it's going to be harder for me to explain this to my dad and my brother and other folks.”
2022-10-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Signal won’t compromise on encryption, with president Meredith Whittaker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is why this was a hard decision, right? Like, those folks are not wrong. That's real, right? Like, I'm one of them, right? He doesn't really know he uses signal, right? He just uses the, you know, the app where the messages come in. This will probably be very confusing. And yeah, I think what we did is make a hard kind of crappy choice. We were presented with two options we didn't like and we chose the one that privileged privacy and security and a kind of a long-term roadmap where again SMS is being deprecated. People were confused. It was causing an increasing amount of errors. And the development effort of maintaining that in addition to doing all the other things was non-trivial. So yeah, those folks are right. When we weighed all of the variables, this is what we came out with. I do think people will continue to use Signal, of course. People will continue adopting it, but it does make me really, you know, I'm not happy about, as I put.”
2022-10-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Signal won’t compromise on encryption, with president Meredith Whittaker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One of the criticisms that I read after the announcement came out was hey, I was able to put signal on my mom's phone and she didn't have to know anything, but I knew that I was now sending her signal messages. This is how you grow the network. Now I need to have two apps. They need to have two apps. This is actually worse for signal adoption because you're not sort of seamlessly onboarding people onto the encrypted network away from SMS. Are you worried about that or do you think this is just straight up? We got to market it and make the thing better.”
2022-10-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Signal won’t compromise on encryption, with president Meredith Whittaker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I haven't looked deeply enough at that to have a clear answer. I think that the answer is TBD, right? Like our goal is for signal to offer unequivocal casual, you know, just completely reliable security and privacy. So we would want to make sure RCS wasn't an issue vis- ⁇-vis those goals. I know, you know, RCS is certainly much better than SMS, but I have not poured over the spec because, again, our primary motivation in this was get rid of this confusing and inherently insecure option.”
2022-10-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Signal won’t compromise on encryption, with president Meredith Whittaker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we're You said RCS isn't on the roadmap. You said Google doesn't have an API for RCS and Android. If Google had an API for RCS and Android, would RCS support go back on the roadmap for Signal and Android?”
2022-10-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Signal won’t compromise on encryption, with president Meredith Whittaker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“People pick up tech, it's not so that they can be taught small nuances, right? It's so they can quickly communicate with their friends. And so getting someone to sort of clock the difference in like a protocol layer security property, that's an education task that is pretty steep. It is very difficult to accomplish and it's particularly difficult to accomplish if unlike Apple you don't control every part of the ecosystem you're operating in.”
2022-10-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Signal won’t compromise on encryption, with president Meredith Whittaker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Let's be clear Apple has advantages we don't there. They control the hardware. They are the gatekeeper for the iOS and the iPhone. And they have a lot of levers they can pull that we can't. They also don't support RCS, right? And we're talking about the Android ecosystem here, but right now there are two competing protocols. There's SMS and there is RCS. difficult to implement a third party SMS app when the phone will default to RCS right so there are a lot of other issues that we face as you know we are not a big tech company that controls the hardware that has that sort of close ecosystem at our disposal so that we can sort of reliably make those choices for users but yeah you know we did a lot of work trying to disambiguate SMS between signal messages and you know this is no fault of the people who use signal this is simply like when people”
2022-10-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Signal won’t compromise on encryption, with president Meredith Whittaker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Pain points, but weighing the kind of security, the confusion, and the fact that SMS is a deprecating standard were things that waited in the direction of removing it and sort of moving on to a future where Signal is fully secure and there's no ambiguity.”
2022-10-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Signal won’t compromise on encryption, with president Meredith Whittaker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is one of those decisions that has been a long time coming, has been agonized over by the leadership team before and after. I joined Surface at the board. They hope and it appears it's set to replace SMS at some point. And that was leading to more and more errors with the SMS integration. So you would not receive a message if your phone defaulted to RCS or something like that. And that meant that that was increasingly hard for us to deal with on the user report side. That meant that it was increasingly difficult to sort of support SMS as a degrading standard. And it was something where there still isn't an official API for RCS for Signal to implement it, even if we were considering it, which was not, that's not on our roadmap at this point. So, you know, those are the considerations that went into making this choice. Again, I am a lifelong or well, the life of signal long Android signal user who's used it as my default the whole time. So this is, you know, like this is the front of my”
2022-10-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Signal won’t compromise on encryption, with president Meredith Whittaker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We are not, we don't share user data publicly. We are not at 100 million users, I guess, is the straight answer to that question. But our user base is growing. And you can see we have over 100 million downloads in the Play Store. We have a significant user base, which is increasing. And I think I definitely think we will get there.”
2022-10-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Signal won’t compromise on encryption, with president Meredith Whittaker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Number of users is like that's a shorthand assessment from Moxie, right? It's number, you know, percentage of 100 million users who also donate, right? Like more users is more hosting, more transit, more registration costs, which is actually sort of a cost without folks donating. But yeah, I think it's tens of millions of dollars a year. So we need enough users donating as a percentage of any user base so that we are able to cover those costs.”
2022-10-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Signal won’t compromise on encryption, with president Meredith Whittaker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Last year we reported that I think it was Moxie's assessment that for Signal to be self sustaining, it would need 100 million users. Is that still the number in your mind? Or how close are you to that goal?”
2022-10-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Signal won’t compromise on encryption, with president Meredith Whittaker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, no, we're going to have a lot of chill. And we want to remind people that we need money, but we also, you know, like the app is a messaging app, right? Like what we're dedicated to first and foremost is you open it. It's useful. It is pleasant. It's not in your face. So, you know, we want to be. Want to remind you, but we want to be really subtle about it, and that is actually something we have a lot of discussions about what is the minimum viable sort of notice to folks that we can get away with and still ensure that people who can donate know and can sign up easily.”
2022-10-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Signal won’t compromise on encryption, with president Meredith Whittaker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, really, this is existentially important for a livable future. We have to have a private way to communicate and folks, particularly folks who are in and around tech, I think will understand that at a visceral level and come on, join the community, kick in.”
2022-10-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Signal won’t compromise on encryption, with president Meredith Whittaker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Download signal if you haven't, make a little monthly donation. It's easy and I can use some boring nonprofit trope. It's like a cup of coffee or whatever.”
2022-10-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Signal won’t compromise on encryption, with president Meredith Whittaker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We have like a hybrid, right? We have only started experimenting with the donation model. So, you know, it was very like for a while there was like a donate page buried on our website that people probably rarely found. And now we are sort of experimenting with just in-app nudges that are like, hey, if you want to kick down, kick down. We have badges which are like cute little signifiers that go on your profile image that just, you know, demonstrate that you donated. People can click on your badge, they can sort of click through to make their own donation. But this is very recent. This is like, you know, in the last year or so. And I think we are again sort of iterating and experimenting with that model. And everyone listening, you know.”
2022-10-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Signal won’t compromise on encryption, with president Meredith Whittaker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Signal and that, you know, frankly is the hardest to kind of cut off at the knees, right? What we don't want is to have, you know, we are really, really fortunate that Brian Acton's generous long-term loan has allowed us this foundation To sort of experiment with sustainability models, to like, you know, grow signal to get it in shape. But I think we're really aiming for small donors both because we think people will be willing to donate and because we want a model that where one person pulling out wouldn't capsize the ship.”
2022-10-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Signal won’t compromise on encryption, with president Meredith Whittaker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not every user needs to donate, right? We need, you know, again, we're never going to charge to use Signal because Privacy shouldn't be only for people who want to pay for it or can pay for it. But we do think that people will recognize I don't subscribe to the theory that people are idiots, right? I think people are very discerning and they get it when they hear it. And people get that the surveillance business model is no good, right? They get that we are some here somewhere fairly scary with the power that has been sort of seeded to these large surveillance tech giants, right? And, you know, they understand that like alternatives are necessary. So, you know, it doesn't have to be everyone, but some percentage of the millions of people who use Signal donating five bucks a month, right? Like that's what we're looking at. Like a casual Patreon model that is, again, at scale so that we are, you know, we're able to support the significant maintenance costs.”
2022-10-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Signal won’t compromise on encryption, with president Meredith Whittaker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, you know, sure, but they can't do it, right? Microsoft can't do it. Facebook can't do it. Facebook will happily tell you that there's more action on Instagram and messaging than there is on the grid or in stories. They haven't displaced iMessage. You've got that problem. And then on top of it, you've got the also the users need to like us so much. They donate to our foundation so we can keep the thing running.”
2022-10-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Signal won’t compromise on encryption, with president Meredith Whittaker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But that's the forever cost is what I'm getting at is it's hard enough to get people to not use iMessage. Like Google has now failed for a decade to get people to switch off of iMessage. So like doing this.”
2022-10-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Signal won’t compromise on encryption, with president Meredith Whittaker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Hard doing it. It's not any cheaper for us just because we don't participate in the surveillance business model, right? So it's tens of millions of dollars a year. And that's like hosting, transit, registration, et cetera, et cetera. All of the costs of just making sure signal is available everywhere always seamlessly, which are the expectations that have been set by the current tech ecology. So I think we do need to continue developing and building signal so it meets those expectations and figure out ways that a service like ours can sustain given the forever cost and given the labor requirements.”
2022-10-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Signal won’t compromise on encryption, with president Meredith Whittaker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Acts like a messaging app, which again is this is not easy. The norms and expectations about what messaging apps should do have been set by these big surveillance messaging apps, right? These big kind of corporate structures, right? And signal, just by way of comparison, this is the sort of stat I've thrown around in a couple of places, but WhatsApp has over a thousand engineers. And that's just their engineering team. I think if you added sort of, you know, support and policy, et cetera, et cetera, you're looking at many thousands of people just sustaining WhatsApp. That's not meta. You have Telegram has somewhere around 500 employees. So that's fairly big. And Signal is 40 people. It's 40 people maintaining an app across three clients. It's hard, thankless, constant work. And I'm privileged to work with the brilliant people who do it. But nonetheless, they work really.”
2022-10-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Signal won’t compromise on encryption, with president Meredith Whittaker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What are the features we can add that competitors might not be willing or able to because of our unique business model, because our incentives are different, because privacy is forefront in our product and in our mission. Then we just need to make sure people know about it and people are able to quickly and easily use it, right? You should open signal. And again, you shouldn't have to really, you know, you can believe that it's important, you can know why you downloaded it. But the second you're using it to like, you know, share directions, you shouldn't be actively thinking about that. It should just work. There should be a seamless experience. You know, you get in there, you know, share your story. We have a new feature that is in beta right now. It's stories. They're very cute. I encourage people to use them and they're fully available. And, you know, it looks and feels.”
2022-10-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Signal won’t compromise on encryption, with president Meredith Whittaker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“First, just install Signal, right? It with the people who are using Signal. In a sense, yes, of course we want people to switch, but many people use many different services, potentially overlapping services for many things, right? So I think we first need to make it clear that Signal is sort of different, right? You know, what we offer is true privacy, not privacy claims with little caveats in a 15-page term of service and make it clear like this is extremely valuable as something that will protect you, allow for intimate, safe conversations with you and your friends. And I think we do see people sort of understanding that, you know, understanding those distinctions increasingly over the last five years. And then our task is to make signal as pleasant and useful as possible.”
2022-10-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Signal won’t compromise on encryption, with president Meredith Whittaker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, we've talked about government pressure, we've talked about the content moderation problem. Those are problems that come with scale, right? As you get more and more scale, more and more governments are going to pressure you to break things, as you get more and more scale, you'll get more and more pressure from your users, from your employees potentially to moderate in some way. Let's actually talk about how you would get that skill right now. In the United States, for example, almost everybody has a phone, right? There's a significant population people who don't have access, but it's reasonably fair to say that people who can get phones have phones in the United States. You have to take market share away from competitors in order to grow, right? You have to, people have to start using Signal and stop using SMS. They have to stop using iMessage. They have to stop using WhatsApp. iMessage is pretty dominant, right? There's like a trope about blue bubbles and green bubbles that exist for a reason. iMessage users are not willing to switch away from this blue bubbles. How do you get them to switch?”
2022-10-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Signal won’t compromise on encryption, with president Meredith Whittaker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This really matters, and it is horrific, right? Full stop, but too often I think that pretext gets used to sort of reflexively instill in people a response to these questions that's like break anything we have to break because this is like too emotionally meaningful for me to like sit by right without you know it almost short circuits that sort of you know deliberate and you know discerning analysis of the the whole scope of the problem so i think that is also an issue with this debate”
2022-10-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Signal won’t compromise on encryption, with president Meredith Whittaker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Arguments that I think there are better people positioned to make than I, but there are a lot of techniques for law enforcement that don't involve immediately turning to digital surveillance, right? And there are a lot of, I think we need to dig into a more troubling history of where are these bad things not prosecuted? Who doesn't get prosecuted for them? Where are there allowed to exist in the analog world because there's an unwillingness or political pressure not to check them or a lack of focus on these and really explore like what other mechanisms exist to check these dynamics that are not often using the most emotionally stirring arguments, which really is, I don't think any of us can sit here and like. To stories about child abuse and not being moved, unless we're sociopaths, right?”
2022-10-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Signal won’t compromise on encryption, with president Meredith Whittaker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Saying the trade offs aren't trade offs, right? There isn't like some kind of scale of justice that we are sort of evening out, right? Like you either break it or you don't. Either signals core premise is intact or it's not. And that's just, you know, that's that. And I also, you know, there are”
2022-10-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Signal won’t compromise on encryption, with president Meredith Whittaker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Scanning for just a little extra, right? It is an extremely dangerous, slippery slope that is right at the nexus of state corporate surveillance. These techniques Whatever you call them need to be understood as sort of backdoors into privacy and encryption. So no, Signal is not, you know, has absolutely no plans to scan anyone's messages to decide which messages are okay or not. That is our general stance there.”
2022-10-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Signal won’t compromise on encryption, with president Meredith Whittaker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Would point to the work of folks like Raina Pfeffercorn, Matt Blaze, Susan Landau, who've looked at sort of content scanning and what we might refer to as analog backdoors, the issue with Apple's proposal to scan everything on your device is that they still control sort of what they're scanning for. And I would also point to a number of the sex worker organizers and people who are more on the margins, who are more fearful of being kind of caught up in these scannings. Often arbitrary, arbitrarily enforced, very rarely are there ways to contest these decisions. And when you have a company like Apple, it's very unclear whether through some national security letter or another mechanism, the US government or another state could mandate.”
2022-10-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Signal won’t compromise on encryption, with president Meredith Whittaker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We don't track or analyze use on specific features. So there are insights that are produced outside of Signal. There is sort of basic sensibilities that come from folks having experience and sort of oftentimes decades of experience in the messaging space. So it's not, you know, we're not riding blind. We're just not relying on surveilling our users to make our choices.”
2022-10-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Signal won’t compromise on encryption, with president Meredith Whittaker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, we don't do analytics or tracking, so we actually don't have that information, which is we have to use other pieces of information and intuition when we're making product choices. But we don't measure that. We have very, very limited information when people last use the app, is it?”
2022-10-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Signal won’t compromise on encryption, with president Meredith Whittaker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So you've added stories, which is the ephemeral messages people are probably familiar with. The reason that those are popular, especially for AppSat, is because they're sticky, right? It gets people to come back and use the app more. And you can measure it and you can say, we need to add more sticky features. Does Signal measure the stickiness of the app? Are you like measuring how people use it to add features that are sticky like that?”
2022-10-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Signal won’t compromise on encryption, with president Meredith Whittaker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We don't have access to your messaging. We don't have access to who you're talking to. We have minimized our access to information about you, about your conversations, about your friends, about your networks. So we are not out there policing who you talk to, policing what you talk about. That's anathemas of the mission of Signal.”
2022-10-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Signal won’t compromise on encryption, with president Meredith Whittaker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, we don't have we're not, you know, we're also not a social media platform, right? We don't amplify content, I think they're called channels, right, where they're sort of broadcast only to like, you know, thousands and thousands of people. We have been really careful in our product development side not to develop Signal as a social network that has sort of algorithmic amplification that allows that one to millions amplification of content. We are a messaging platform. So we don't have a content moderation team because one, we are fully private. We don't see your content. We don't know who you're talking about. And two, because we're not, you know, we're not a content platform. It's a different paradigm.”
2022-10-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Signal won’t compromise on encryption, with president Meredith Whittaker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So are you asking, do we have people out there clicking every link that is and then like checking out does the forum sort of comport with an ideological position that Signal agrees with? Because we don't have that.”
2022-10-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Signal won’t compromise on encryption, with president Meredith Whittaker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“with on this, you know, the difference between that and being able to sort of clearly and securely sort of participate in those ethical activities. And again, there is no Splitting the baby on this question, either it is secure and it's private for everyone, or it's not. And then there's a big question, like an existential question, like, why do this at all?”
2022-10-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Signal won’t compromise on encryption, with president Meredith Whittaker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, so I was participating along with many others in networks of ethical whistleblowing, which would have provided that pretext, right? Like easy. Like pick this person off. But we were using Signal and we knew Signal was secure and we were using Signal on our personal devices so there was no like device manager that was able to key log very important detail for those of you taking notes and that meant that I could feel safe being part of those activities And I you know, it's very It's hard to describe in like clear, you know, kind of analytical sterile technical terms what that meant but it was you know it's the difference between that like stomach dropping fear when you're like did one of the most sophisticated technical adversaries just like you know blow up my spot you know which means that like I'm unsafe my health insurance is unsafe I might you know implicate some of my friends who I'm you know also working”
2022-10-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Signal won’t compromise on encryption, with president Meredith Whittaker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To fire me, right? And those pretexts exist. I was part of ethical whistleblowing networks. We were sort of sharing information we thought was in the public interest with the public and with journalists, which I stand behind. A lot of this information should not be behind the walls of proprietary tech companies where the decisions are being made based on profit, not on social good, full stop.”
2022-10-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Signal won’t compromise on encryption, with president Meredith Whittaker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think the question of like, but what if bad actors did it is compelling and it's often very emotionally charged, right? Like these are the truth remains, however, that like you can't provide a service that truly protects the privacy of good actors, you know, many of whom often have a lot less power than the people they're not wanting to be surveilled and tracked by while sort of opening up that service to allow surveillance of bad actors. Like there isn't squaring that circle. And, you know, I think we are committed to providing a service that is, again, truly private for both. And I can talk about when I was participating in labor organizing at Google, we used Signal. And we were, you know, I knew because I'd been at the company for over a decade at that point, you know, that the company was. Pad teams that were looking for a pretext.”
2022-10-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Signal won’t compromise on encryption, with president Meredith Whittaker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that story from Casey Newton was not a totally clear picture of the real dynamics inside Signal. Really, think about these is in the sort of product direction, right? When we're thinking through new features and capabilities, a number of very smart people who spend a lot of time thinking through the implications.”
2022-10-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Signal won’t compromise on encryption, with president Meredith Whittaker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So then there's the flip side of it, which is sort of internal to signal and what value signal has as a company and what things you can and can't do because you cannot see into the content, which I think is maybe the most difficult thing for any company to reckon with when they operate a service with lots and lots of users who might do lots and lots of things. In 2021, we published a story from Casey Newton about that group chat feature you mentioned where you can share links to group chats. Thousands of people can join them. Signal obviously cannot see what is going on inside of this group chats because it's encrypted. That means bad actors can do bad things inside of Signal and spread their messages inside of Signal. Is that something that concerns you?”
2022-10-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Signal won’t compromise on encryption, with president Meredith Whittaker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, we would walk. We will not hand over the keys to our encryption. We will not break the encryption. And in fact, the way we're built, we don't have access to those keys.”
2022-10-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Signal won’t compromise on encryption, with president Meredith Whittaker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, if the choice is breaking signal or walking, but again, I think a lot of times these policy strategies and discussions just, you know, they're not, it's not like a Boolean, right? It's not cut and dry engineering decision. These are very muddy and frankly not things that it's usually best to sort of go into detail on publicly because you're having to think about a lot of different sort of political social, et cetera dynamics all at once and sort of make up to the minute choices based on like dynamic situation. So that is a very broad answer. But again, like I think we're going to be keeping our eye on it. We're going to again be doing everything we can to remain available to as many people as possible without breaking signal.”
2022-10-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Signal won’t compromise on encryption, with president Meredith Whittaker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We are still available to people in India who want to use Signal, right? We are not going to compromise on privacy. And that is our stance. And we'll do everything we can to continue to be available to the people in India who want and need signal”
2022-10-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Signal won’t compromise on encryption, with president Meredith Whittaker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT