When asked about the privacy implications of chatbots like ChatGPT and Claude, Signal president Meredith Whitaker responded, “These are not your friends. These are not sentient beings. They are not sentient interlocutors.”
Whittaker made these comments in a wide-ranging interview with Bloomberg on policy, privacy, and Signal. She admitted that she uses AI tools “to format documents 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 considering ideas (…) to be hampered or overshadowed by the response of a system that averages out what’s already there.”
Regarding Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleiman’s prediction that users will be able to rely on Microsoft Copilot to do all their Christmas shopping this year, Whittaker argued that this scenario (with Copilot eavesdropping on family group chats to determine who they want) would mean giving them 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 just described is a system that has very broad access across multiple applications and services,” Whitaker said. “In the context of Signal, this constitutes a kind of backdoor.”
