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 sentient beings. These are not sentient interlocutors.”
Whittaker made those comments in a broader interview with Bloomberg about policy, privacy and Signal. He acknowledged that he uses artificial intelligence tools “to format a document here and there,” but insisted: “I don’t ask them questions. I take my thinking and my writing very seriously, and I don’t want the process of working on an idea […] be excluded or overshadowed by the response of a system that is averaging what already exists.”
Regarding Microsoft’s AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman’s prediction that users could let Microsoft Copilot handle all their holiday shopping this year, Whittaker argued that this scenario (in which Copilot eavesdrops on the family group chat to determine who she wants) means giving “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 with very widespread access across multiple applications and services,” Whittaker said. “In the context of Signal, it would constitute something of a backdoor.”