Working at Google taught Signal President Meredith Whittaker what not to do

After a career in academia, government work, and the tech industry, Meredith Whittaker took up a top role at the Signal Foundation last year and joined the nonprofit world after a career in academia, government work, and the tech industry.

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With tens of millions of people using it over the world to keep their chats private and out of the grasp of big tech companies, she is now president of an organization that operates one of the world's most popular encrypted messaging apps.

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As someone who has served as a Google employee for 13 years, Whittaker has real-world reasons to be skeptical of for-profit companies and the way they use data.

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After working for the company for more than a decade, she was informed in 2017 by a friend that Google's cloud computing division was engaged in a contentious Project Maven deal with the Department of Defense. She and other staff members believed it was hypocritical of Google to develop artificial intelligence technology that might be applied to drone warfare. They began debating joining forces to sue the corporation.

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“Each week, there were meetings, and people were discussing how to organize,” Whittaker said in an interview with Trade Algo, in addition to noting that Women's History Month was the backdrop to the interview. “It was as if there was already some kind of consciousness within the company that hadn't existed before."

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Amidst the heightened tensions, Google workers discovered that the company had reportedly offered ex-executive Andy Rubin an exit package worth $90 million despite credible allegations of sexual misconduct against the Android founder.

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Whittaker was one of the organizers behind a massive walkout against Google in which thousands of Google workers joined together to demand greater transparency for the company and an end to forced arbitration for its employees. There has never been an employee walkout of such magnitude in the history of the tech industry, which had seen very few high-profile instances of employee activism up until then.

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"Give me a break," Whittaker said of Rubin's revelations and the walkout that followed. "Everyone knew that the whisper network was no longer whispering."

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A comment from Google was not immediately available.

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After leaving Google in February 2019, Whittaker plans on returning to New York University full-time as the director of the AI Now Institute, an organization she co-founded in 2017 with the "mission of ensuring AI systems are accountable to the communities and contexts in which they are used."

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Whittaker never intended to pursue a career in technology as a career path. She studied rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley, where she earned a bachelor's degree. As she said, she was broke and was looking for a job when she applied for a job at Google in 2006, after submitting a resume on Monster.com. Eventually, she was able to find a temporary position in the customer support department.

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"It was kind of an eye-opening moment when someone explained to me that a server was a different kind of computer from a personal computer," Whittaker said. "At that time, the world wasn't a place where every kid was learning to code - it was still a time before it was saturated with that knowledge."

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‘Why do we get free juice?’

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Whittaker had to become used to the industry's culture in addition to learning about technology. It at the time meant extravagant benefits and a lot of pampering at companies like Google.

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"Trying to understand why we receive free juice was a part of it," Whittaker stated. "It seemed so strange to me because I didn't grow up rich."

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By observing and asking questions, Whittaker said that she would "osmotically learn" more about the tech industry and Google's place within it. Although it entailed much complexity and touched on political, economic, and sociological issues, she recalls it sounded very straightforward when she first heard about Google's ambition to index all of the world's knowledge.

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"What makes Google so passionate about net neutrality? Whittaker made the comment in reference to the firm's fight to make sure that internet service providers allow equal access to content distribution.

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The tech sector claims that these costs amount to an unjust "internet tax" and that several European telecommunications providers are now lobbying regulators to impose "fair share" taxes on digital businesses.

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"I guess I learned the political and economic stuff at the same time," Whittaker said of technological nuances. "Now I see how what we're saying publicly and how it might operate internally differ."

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At Signal, Whittaker is able to concentrate on the mission without being concerned about sales. Due to its capacity to jumble messages so that outside parties cannot eavesdrop on the communications, Signal has grown in popularity among journalists, researchers, and activists.

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Whittaker, who founded Signal as a charity, claimed that as such, it is "existentially crucial" to society and that there is no hidden financial incentive for the program to stray from its declared stance of preserving private communication.

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In order to have as little data as possible, Whittaker remarked, "We go out of our way, sometimes paying a lot more money and a lot more time. We have no idea who is talking to whom, we have no idea who you are, who is in your contact list, or who your profile photo is."

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Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla and Twitter, has lauded Signal as a direct messaging application and stated in a tweet from November that "the purpose of Twitter DMs is to superset Signal."

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Musk and Whittaker have similar concerns about companies making money off of AI technologies. Musk supported OpenAI, the company that created ChatGPT, while it was still a startup. Yet in a subsequent tweet, he said that it had turned into a "maximum-profit enterprise effectively controlled by Microsoft." OpenAI, which describes itself as a "capped-profit" company, received a multibillion-dollar investment from Microsoft in January.

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Besides being out on the hype surrounding ChatGPT, Whittaker doesn't seem to understand what all the fuss is about with OpenAI. Recently, Google entered the generative AI market with a chatbot dubbed Bard, which is the result of Google's entry into this market.

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There is little value to Whittaker in the technology, and she has difficulty seeing any uses for it that would be game-changing. After a while, the excitement will wane, though "maybe not as precipitously as with something like Web3 or something," she explained.

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It does not understand anything," Whittaker said of ChatGPT and other tools similar to it. "It predicts what the next word in a sentence will likely be based on its previous words."

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Comment requests were not immediately returned by OpenAI.

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As a result, she fears that businesses could "use generative AI software to justify the degradation of people's jobs," which in turn could result in writers, editors, and content creators losing their jobs as a result. In addition, she wants people to know that Signal does not have any plans to implement ChatGPT into their service in the near future.

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"On record, I would like to say as clearly and loudly as I can, No!” Whittaker said.