Meredith Whittaker. Luis Grañena
Meredith Whittaker is one of the most critical voices against the lack of ethics of the technological giants.
A key figure in the study of the social implications of artificial intelligence (AI) and co-founder of the AI Now Institute at New York University, she was one of the main promoters of the strike that has done the most damage to Google.
In 2018, this Californian researcher, often seen in public dressed in black and wearing a leather jacket, mobilized 20,000 employees to protest the way the company protected Andy Rubin —the creator of Android—, paying him 90 million dollars to get him to leave the company when he was denounced for sexual harassment.
Whittaker had worked for the search engine on ethical issues for 13 years and had founded Google's Open Research Group—focused on open source security and privacy tools.
The strike got Google to eliminate private arbitration, allowing employees to sue the company in court.
But a year later she was forced to resign from her position after denouncing in
The New York Times
that she had been relegated for having coordinated the strike.
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Don't make their job easy
The case of Meredith Whittaker at Google exemplifies the lack of protection to which whistleblowers
are exposed
, an English word that refers to those who reveal illegal conduct in the public interest, such as Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning or Frances Haugen.
But she also opens a path to hope.
Instead of being punished or made invisible, in 2021 the US Federal Trade Commission offered her a consulting position through which she joined the Biden Administration to lay the foundations for government AI policy.
And now Signal, the leading application in encrypted communication — neither governments nor companies can, supposedly, access messages or any user information — entrusts him with a crucial position at the forefront of the company's strategy.
Throughout his life, Whittaker has been committed to what he believes in.
He studied English Literature and Rhetoric at UC Berkeley because he loves to read.
She is a yoga teacher and she has been practicing daily for 20 years and firmly believes in transparency, which is why perhaps she does not hide her gray hair, which is part of her identity.
She works defending people's privacy, while zealously protecting her own privacy.
She was born in Los Angeles (California), but she does not reveal the year to prevent other data from her life that she does not want to share.
And she is active on Twitter on tech-related issues.
His interest in ethical issues related to AI stemmed from a day when someone from Harvard proposed to finance an AI system that "predicted genocide", but he was unable to answer how genocide would be modeled, what data they used to train said model or who would implement it.
The situation worried him.
He discovered many irresponsible projects that use data collected over the internet, label this data using whatever methodology, and then use it as real data to train systems to make determinations and predictions.
Prior to Signal, Whittaker has advised the White House, New York City and the European Parliament on security and privacy matters.
“Meredith has a long history of championing digital privacy that aligns with our principles,” says Brian Acton, co-founder of Signal.
The new position is a job tailored to Whittaker, who since 2020 was part of the organization's board of directors and whose main function will be to ensure that the
app
achieves financial stability.
“We chose to be an NGO and fund the project with donations to avoid the surveillance business model that prevails in today's society,” Whittaker explains by email.
“We want to increase the number of users because the more users use the
app
, with more people it will be possible to speak with guarantees of privacy and security”, he affirms.
Despite the nature of Signal, founded on respect for user privacy, the organization is not without controversy and Whittaker's path will not be an easy one.
Its many detractors come from large corporations and censoring governments from different countries, such as Iran or China.
But also from democratic governments such as the US, which has repeatedly asked them to reveal information about their users.
These agents believe that Signal conceals the communication of criminals.
Whittaker is emphatic: “Breaking encrypted communication to prevent bad actors from using it is breaking it for everyone.
There is no trick that allows the good guys to spy on the bad guys without paying just for sinners."
And she adds: "We must protect journalists and sources who risk denouncing illegalities."
Meredith Whittaker does not change her principles, according to Claire Stapleton, who organized the Google strike with her.
“She is an intellectual titan, but one of the warmest and most down-to-earth people I know,” she says by email.
“In an industry (and a world!) where integrity tends to be compromised for personal gain, Meredith would never do it,” she says.
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