Meredith Whittaker
President, Signal Foundation
Trace a path from Meredith Whittaker →Portrait painted after an image by Martin Kraft · CC BY-SA 4.0
About
Meredith Whittaker is the president of the Signal Foundation, the nonprofit behind the encrypted messaging app Signal, a role she took in September 2022. She spent more than a decade at Google, where she founded Google Open Research and co-founded M-Lab, a major source of open internet performance data. In 2017 she co-founded the AI Now Institute at NYU with Kate Crawford, and in 2018 she was a core organizer of the Google Walkouts and the protest against Project Maven, before leaving the company in 2019. She later served as a senior AI advisor to FTC Chair Lina Khan. She argues that 'AI' is a marketing term, and that the useful response is to demand technical specificity about what these systems are made of, who controls them and where their data goes.
Key Contributions
- Co-founded the AI Now Institute at NYU with Kate Crawford (2017), an early center for research on the social consequences of AI
- Core organizer of the 2018 Google Walkouts, and author of the petition against Google's work on Project Maven
- Testified to the U.S. House on AI ethics (2019) and facial recognition (2020), arguing for whistleblower protections and limits on facial recognition
- Senior advisor on AI to FTC Chair Lina Khan (2021)
- As Signal's president, pushes OS makers for a developer-level opt-out from AI agents' data access, arguing that screen-reading agents threaten private messaging itself
