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- Message safely. While Elon Musk and a bevy of billionaire tech CEOs head to Washington, Meredith Whittaker is looking to Europe. The noted Big Tech critic and president of Signal, the secure messaging platform, believes that Silicon Valley is no longer home to tech's hottest innovation.
"This is where the cool, smart people who I used to meet in the cafeteria at Google in the mid-2000s are," she told me onstage at the tech conference Slush in Helsinki late last year. "Really vibrant tech ecosystems are only growing outside of Silicon Valley." That divide comes down to different approaches to regulation and profit motive on either side of the Atlantic, Whittaker says.
Whittaker became the president of Signal in 2022. She had worked at Google for a decade before becoming disillusioned with the tech giant over its contract with the Department of Defense and other issues; she was an organizer of the Google staff's 2018 walkout. Since taking over leadership of Signal, Whittaker has become an even louder voice for privacy and alternatives to what she calls Big Tech's "surveillance business model."
In recent months, Signal has worked to develop its presence globally. The platform has hundreds of millions of users—including members of governments, militaries, boardrooms, and human rights organizations—who rely on its service to communicate without risk of their messages being seen by others. "We're interested in really driving home the value of private communications in a world that is not getting less volatile, to be diplomatic about it," she says.
When we spoke, Whittaker said that Signal had, as per usual, seen an increase in signups following the U.S. election. "At moments where people are unsure what those in power may or may not do and how that may affect them, that's when privacy comes home to be a lived value—when you feel it in your body instead of as abstract notion," she says.
Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com
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