When asked about the privacy implications of chatbots like ChatGPT and Claude, Signal President Meredith Whittaker responded, “These are not your friends. These are not conscious beings. These are not sentient interlocutors.”
Whittaker made these comments in a wide-ranging interview with Bloomberg about policy, privacy, and Signal. While she acknowledged that she uses AI tools “to format documents here and there”, she insisted, “I don’t ask them questions. I’m very serious about my thinking and my writing, and I don’t want the process of working out ideas (…) to be excluded or obscured by the response of a system that averages out what already exists.”
Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman predicted that users will be able to have Microsoft Copilot handle all their Christmas shopping this year. Whittaker claimed that if Copilot eavesdrops on family group chats to determine who it wants, it means giving it “access to my credit cards, my browser, my Signal, the ability to message my siblings on my behalf, my home address (and) my calendar.”
“What you just described is a very broadly accessible system across multiple applications and services,” Whittaker said. “In the context of Signal, this would constitute a backdoor of sorts.”
