Meredith Whittaker
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Meredith Whittaker is an American technologist, researcher, and privacy advocate who serves as president of the Signal Foundation, the nonprofit behind the encrypted messaging app Signal, a role she has held since 2022 [1][2]. She worked at Google for about thirteen years, where she founded the company's Open Research group and helped create Measurement Lab, and she co-founded the AI Now Institute at New York University with Kate Crawford in 2017 [1][3]. She helped organize the 2018 Google walkout over the company's handling of sexual misconduct cases, and she later said she experienced retaliation before leaving the company in 2019 [4][5].
Whittaker is one of the more prominent critics of what she calls the surveillance business model of the technology industry, and she has argued that modern artificial intelligence is bound up with that model [6][7]. She has also raised concerns about the privacy and security implications of agentic AI systems that act on a user's behalf [8]. TIME magazine named her one of the 100 most influential people in AI in 2023 [9].
Whittaker grew up in the United States and completed a bachelor's degree at the University of California, Berkeley, where she studied rhetoric and English literature [1][3]. She does not have a formal background in computer science or engineering, and she has described her route into the field as unusual for someone who later worked on technical research and policy [3][10].
Whittaker joined Google in 2006 [1]. During her tenure she founded Google Open Research, a group that worked with the open source and academic communities on questions tied to network measurement, net neutrality, privacy, security, and the social effects of computing systems [1][3]. She also helped create Measurement Lab, usually shortened to M-Lab, a distributed network measurement platform that publishes open data on internet performance and connectivity [1]. M-Lab is described as one of the largest open sources of data on internet speed and reliability [1].
In 2018 Whittaker drafted a petition opposing Project Maven, a contract under which Google supplied machine learning for analyzing drone footage for the United States military [4]. More than three thousand employees signed the petition, and Google later said it would not renew the contract [4]. She was also part of internal objections to the makeup of an external AI ethics advisory board that Google announced and then dissolved in 2019 [5][11].
Whittaker was one of the core organizers of the Google walkout on November 1, 2018, in which more than 20,000 employees across the company's offices stopped work [4][12]. The protest followed a New York Times report that Andy Rubin, an executive accused of sexual misconduct, had received a severance package reported at about 90 million dollars [12]. Organizers set out demands that included an end to forced arbitration in harassment cases and greater transparency around misconduct, and Google agreed to some of these changes [12].
In April 2019 Whittaker and fellow organizer Claire Stapleton said publicly that they had faced retaliation tied to their roles in the walkout [4][5]. Whittaker said she had been told her role would change and that she would need to step away from her work at the AI Now Institute, which she said came without a stated reason [4][5]. Google has said it does not tolerate retaliation and that it investigates such complaints [5][12]. Whittaker resigned from Google in July 2019, one of several walkout organizers who left the company within about a year [4][5].
In 2017 Whittaker co-founded the AI Now Institute at New York University together with the researcher Kate Crawford [1][3]. The institute studies the social implications of artificial intelligence and related technologies, and it grew in part out of a symposium that the two had helped convene [1][3]. It was among the early university research centers focused on the topic and one of the few led by women [3][13].
The institute's research has centered on areas that include bias and inclusion, civil rights and liberties, labor and automation, and safety in critical infrastructure [13]. Its annual reports and workshops examined questions such as the use of automated decision systems by government agencies, the effects of AI on workers, and the accountability of systems that affect people's lives [13]. Whittaker served as the institute's faculty director and held the title of Minderoo Research Professor at NYU [1][2]. She later moved to the role of chief advisor to the institute [1][3].
In published work and in congressional testimony, Whittaker has argued that AI systems can reproduce and entrench existing patterns of bias, and she has been skeptical of approaches that treat technical audits alone as a sufficient remedy [3][11]. In the case of facial recognition, she has at times called for limits on or a halt to certain deployments rather than reliance on accuracy fixes [3][11].
In November 2021 the Federal Trade Commission announced that Whittaker had joined as a senior advisor on artificial intelligence to the chair, Lina Khan [2][14]. The role placed her among a group of staff advising the agency on emerging technology and on the relationship between concentration of corporate power and the harms associated with AI [2][14]. She left the position when she took up the presidency of the Signal Foundation in 2022 [1][2].
Whittaker became president of the Signal Foundation in September 2022, a newly created position at the organization [1][2]. The Signal Foundation is a nonprofit that develops Signal, an encrypted messaging application that uses end to end encryption and collects little user data [2][15]. The foundation was established in 2018 with an initial loan of about 50 million dollars from Brian Acton, a co-founder of WhatsApp, and it is funded through donations rather than advertising [15][16].
As president, Whittaker has presented Signal as an alternative to what she describes as the surveillance business model that funds much of the technology industry [6][16]. She has argued that this model, built on the collection of personal data for targeted advertising, creates power imbalances between companies and the people who use their products [6][16]. In her account, Signal cannot take part in that model and instead relies on a nonprofit structure and user support [6][16].
Whittaker has connected this critique to artificial intelligence. At the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in 2023 she said that AI is, in her words, a surveillance technology, and that it depends on large quantities of data and computing power in ways that reinforce the same data extraction practices [7]. She has said the overlap between AI as it is built today and the surveillance business model is, in her phrasing, a circle rather than a partial overlap [7]. She has also argued that the systems are often marketed to institutions that hold power over people, including employers, governments, and border agencies [7].
At the South by Southwest conference in March 2025, Whittaker described what she sees as security and privacy problems with agentic AI, meaning systems designed to carry out tasks for a user across applications [8]. She argued that for such an agent to book travel, send messages, or manage a calendar, it would need broad access across a device, which she compared to root level permissions, and that the data involved would often be processed in the clear and sent to cloud servers [8]. She warned that connecting such agents to a private messaging app would undercut the guarantees of encrypted communication, since the agent would need to read message contents to act on them [8]. She summarized the trade off with the image of putting one's brain in a jar, a metaphor for handing personal context to an external system [8]. She has described AI agents as a threat to the integrity of secure messaging [8].
Whittaker is widely cited as a voice in debates over AI governance, technology regulation, and digital privacy [9][10]. She has testified before lawmakers, spoken at international forums, and called for stronger protections for technology workers who raise concerns about their employers [4][11]. Commentators have noted that her experience at Google, where she both built research programs and helped organize labor protest, informs her later positions on corporate power and accountability [9][10].
In 2023 TIME magazine included Whittaker in its inaugural list of the 100 most influential people in artificial intelligence, identifying her as a leading advocate for privacy and a critic of concentration in the AI industry [9]. Her work with the AI Now Institute and her public commentary as Signal's president are frequently referenced in coverage of surveillance, encryption, and the social effects of AI [6][9][10].
| Field | Detail |
|---|---|
| Full name | Meredith Whittaker |
| Nationality | American |
| Education | B.A., rhetoric and English literature, University of California, Berkeley |
| Known for | Signal Foundation presidency; co-founding the AI Now Institute; 2018 Google walkout |
| Google tenure | 2006 to 2019 (about 13 years) |
| Founded at Google | Open Research group; co-founder of Measurement Lab (M-Lab) |
| AI Now Institute | Co-founder with Kate Crawford, 2017; faculty director; later chief advisor |
| NYU title | Minderoo Research Professor |
| FTC role | Senior advisor on AI to the chair, from November 2021 |
| Signal Foundation | President, from September 2022 |
| Recognition | TIME 100 most influential people in AI (2023) |