Elon Musk 'broke the seal' on global tech lay-offs, says Signal president Meredith Whittaker
President of the Signal Foundation Meredith Whittaker, said: “I think what happened was Twitter broke the seal and then gave permission to the industry to cite a fairly ephemeral economic downturn, which didn’t actually manifest itself, as a reason to break a number of promises and cut teams that they weren’t seeing as valuable for whatever reason.” Picture: Wikimedia
Meredith Whittaker is a thorn in the side of tech multinationals that provide free services globally in return for personal data.
In her role as president of the foundation which operates the private end-to-end encrypted messaging app Signal, she has proven there is a way to provide people with a free communication app without sacrificing privacy.
However, Ms Whittaker said the surveillance business model used by rival apps is “incredibly profitable” for them and trying to provide the same tool in an ethical way comes at a cost.
The company said it would need around $50m (€45m) every year to be able to continue to provide calling, file sharing, messaging and recording to Signal users.
“In order to do what we do to provide a private alternative to surveillant messengers, we have to play in their lane,” said Ms Whittaker. Doing the same thing as major players in the industry like WhatsApp without data collection can be “extremely expensive”, according to Ms Whittaker.
The not-for-profit is funded through donations and loans, including one $50m loan from its founder Brian Acton. Mr Acton was previously the founder of WhatsApp which he sold to Facebook, now known as Meta, for around $19bn in 2014.
Mr Acton stayed on with the company but then later left and told the press that Facebook had coached him on how to mislead EU regulators regarding data collection. Signal was therefore established in 2017 to help people securely send messages especially when in vulnerable situations.
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Ms Whittaker said that she has seen spikes in Signal uses when geopolitical tensions rise but did not have recent figures on its usage during the wars in Gaza and Ukraine.
Signal is used by approximately 40 million active users. Growth in usage hit the app in 2021 which caused servers to crash and provide limited access for the following two days.
"The social costs of normalized privacy invasion are staggeringly high, and maintaining and caring for alternative technology has never been more important," the company said recently.
Ms Whittaker said the $50m required each year is “fairly low compared to other free alternatives”. One of the contributing factors to this is Signal’s small headcount of around 50 employees.
In the past, Ms Whittaker has been an advocate for tech workers' rights and was instrumental in the Google walk-outs in 2018 over the handling of the sexual harassment claims. Her opinions of the treatment of tech workers has not changed dramatically since then and she criticised the sector's recent handling of the global redundancies.
“I think what happened was Twitter broke the seal and then gave permission to the industry to cite a fairly ephemeral economic downturn, which didn’t actually manifest itself, as a reason to break a number of promises and cut teams that they weren’t seeing as valuable for whatever reason,” she said.
More than 200,000 jobs have been cut worldwide including more than 3,000 in Ireland. However, under EU rules many Irish tech workers were protected by lengthy redundancy processes and Ms Whittaker would like to see employees in other jurisdictions unionise for the same types of protections.
“Especially in the US where we have such an impoverished social safety net,” she said.
Speaking further about the lay-offs she said they “simply prove the point that your employer is not your family”.
Ms Whittaker spoke to the after her appearance at Web Summit this year. Ms Whittaker declined to give a full comment on the resignation of former chief executive Paddy Cosgrave following backlash for his comments on the Israeli-Hamas war on X, formerly known as Twitter, that led to many tech multinationals boycotting the trade show in Lisbon.
This was her second time attending Web Summit and she said comparably “it seemed pretty similar, maybe less food in the speakers forum. I didn’t see a diminished attendance or anything”.
Ms Whittaker has worked with Web Summit’s new chief executive at the Signal Foundation as Katherine Maher holds the chair of the board.
During the conference, Ms Whittaker said that “because tech has such a global and significant reach, one jurisdiction can do a lot to shape technology even if it’s not in the US”. She said regulations in one jurisdiction could have a "profound effect in shaping how these companies behave".
Ms Whittaker suggested the best way to regulate tech firms is for jurisdictions, including Europe and the US, to form regulations together.
Earlier this week, Data Protection Commissioner Helen Dixon officially announced plans to leave the role early next year. Ms Dixon was already finishing out her tenure but the details of her departure were revealed this week.
She is expected to take the top job at Ireland’s communications regulator ComReg. The DPC has often been referred to as soft in their handling of Big Tech data breaches.
Ms Whittaker said she was not overly familiar with the DPC’s methods but said that she would like to see Ms Dixon’s successor “undermine the surveillance business model that prevents the collection of personal information, that pushes back on surveillance advertising, the dominant profit engine of tech”.
