Why Signal won’t compromise on encryption, with president Meredith Whittaker

Decoder with Nilay Patel

Meredith Whittaker is the president of Signal, the popular messaging app that offers encrypted communication. You might recognize Meredith’s name from 2018 when she was an AI researcher at Google and one of the organizers of the Google walkout. Now she’s at Signal, which is a little different than the usual tech company: it’s operated by a nonprofit foundation and prides itself on collecting as little data as possible.

But messaging apps are a complicated business. Governments around the world really dislike encrypted messaging and often push companies to put in backdoors for surveillance and law enforcement because criminals use encrypted messaging for all sorts of deeply evil things. But there’s no half step to breaking encryption, so companies like Signal often find themselves in the difficult position of refusing to help governments. You might recall that Apple has often refused to help the government break into iPhones, for example. I wanted to know how that tradeoff plays out at Signal’s much smaller and more idealistic scale.

This is a good one, with lots of Decoder themes in the mix. We have to start doing checklists or something. Okay, Meredith Whittaker, president of Signal. Here we go.

Links:

The battle inside Signal

Yes, even Signal is doing stories now

Here’s why Apple’s new child safety features are so controversial

Signal is ‘starting to phase out SMS support’ from its Android app

A very brief history of every Google messaging app

RCS: What it is and why you might want it

Let’s chat about RCS

WhatsApp is now entirely end-to-end encrypted

Moxie Marlinspike has stepped down as CEO of Signal

Meredith Whittaker Tweet

Transcript:

https://www.theverge.com/e/23173757

Credits:

Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Today’s episode was produced by Creighton DeSimone and Jackie McDermott and it was edited by Jackson Bierfeldt.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Our Sr Audio Director is Andrew Marino and our Executive Producer is Eleanor Donovan.

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