Meredith Whittaker

Meredith Whittaker Profile

Meredith Whittaker is the President of the Signal Foundation, the non-profit organisation founded to protect free expression and enable secure global communication through open source privacy technology. The foundation wholly owns Signal Messenger, the secure messaging app trusted by hundreds of millions of users globally.

Meredith was previously the co-founder and Faculty Director of the AI Now Institute, where her research and advocacy focused on the social implications of artificial intelligence and the tech industry responsible for it, with a particular emphasis on power and the political economy driving the commercialization of computational technology.

Prior to founding AI Now, she worked at Google for over a decade, where she led product and engineering teams, founded Google’s Open Research Group, and co-founded M-Lab, a globally distributed network measurement platform that now provides the world’s largest source of open data on internet performance. She was a core organizer of the Google Walkouts over sexual abuse coverups and their secret defence work with Project Maven, and resigned from the company in July 2019.

She has advised the White House, the FCC, FTC, the City of New York, the European Parliament, and many other governments and civil society organisations on artificial intelligence, internet policy, measurement, privacy, and security.