Meredith Whittaker

Last week, it almost seemed like Elon Musk was going to do a good thing. The eccentric, loud-mouthed billionaire announced he would be suing OpenAI, the influential tech company he co-founded back in 2015. The reason? Musk said that OpenAI had betrayed its original mandate of “helping humanity.” The company, which notably began as an open-source research organization, had morphed into a profit-sucking corporate Goliath with little interest in sharing its code. As such, Musk said in his lawsuit that he wanted a court to…

WhatsApp head Will Cathcart has reportedly refused to undermine the messaging platform's end-to-end encryption – a feature that the Meta-owned company has promoted innumerable times in the past – risking the company’s business in the UK. By taking this stand, it has joined the rival app Signal in essentially "pushing back" the UK's demand of "lowering the security" of the messaging service.As per a report by BBC, Cathcart said the company will rather be blocked in the UK than to weaken the privacy of encrypted messages…

Photo: Leon Neal (Getty Images)Facebook and Instagram are taking some of their strongest steps yet to clamp down on child sexual abuse material (CSAM) that is flooding their social networks. Meta, the parent company of both, is creating a database in partnership with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) that will allow users to submit a “digital fingerprint” of known child abuse material, a numerical code related to an image or video rather than the file itself. The code will be stored and…

The mysticism that has allowed tech firms to make billions of dollars from surveillance is finally clearing, the boss of encrypted messaging app Signal told AFP. The mysticism that has allowed tech firms to make billions of dollars from surveillance is finally clearing, the boss of encrypted messaging app Signal told AFP. Meredith Whittaker, who spent years working for Google before helping to organise a staff walkout in 2018 over working conditions, said tech was "valorised" and "fetishised" when she first began in…

Signal, the free and open source end-to-end encrypted messaging service, has become increasingly popular as an alternative to WhatsApp over the past decade with its support for end-to-end encrypted calls and messages. The feature is designed to prevent anyone except the sender and the intended recipient from accessing calls and messages sent on the app. In a recent interview, the president of the non-profit organisation behind Signal reportedly stated that the service would rather exit a country rather than compromise on…

Telegram has been rather hands off on its old TON Blockchain it developed years ago, but now the company wants to let users sell their own name for profit.Photo: nikkimeel (Shutterstock)How much is your digital identity worth to you, or at least, how much is it worth in crypto? Well thanks to instant messaging app Telegram, you can soon find out. Telegram has plans to let users hang their digital identifier up on a public marketplace to see whether other folks think your name is also worth a good chunk of change.Telegram…

Photo: Edward Smith (Getty Images)Want to help bring encrypted messaging to a despotic regime that treats women like shit? Well, now’s your chance. Signal is currently asking users to help make its end-to-end encrypted messaging service available in Iran. Signal offers what is broadly considered the most secure, privacy-centric communication platform in the business. However, the app was blocked in Iran last January, after seeing increased popularity there. In light of protests currently roiling the country, the company…

Meredith Whittaker addresses hundreds of Google employees during a protest rally on Thursday, Nov. 1, 2018, in New York. Google employees walked off the job in a protest against what they said is the tech company’s mishandling of sexual misconduct allegations against executives.Photo: Bebeto Matthews (AP)Since its debut eight years ago, the face of the encrypted messaging app Signal has been its founder Moxie Marlinspike. In January, Marlinspike said he’d be stepping down as CEO. And while Signal hasn’t found a permanent…