Meredith Whittaker

Meredith Whittaker has spent two decades pushing against the default assumption of the modern data economy — that platforms are entitled to collect, analyse and monetise everything about their users. As president of the Signal Foundation, which oversees the end-to-end encrypted messaging app used by hundreds of millions of people, she now runs one of the few large-scale technology organisations explicitly built to minimise data collection rather than maximise it.

Whittaker spent thirteen years at Google, where she founded the company's Open Research group and co-founded M-Lab, a global network-measurement project that became one of the largest open datasets on internet performance. Her time there culminated in her becoming a central organiser of the 2018 Google Walkouts, mobilising some 20,000 employees to protest the company's handling of sexual misconduct allegations and its involvement in the Pentagon's Project Maven programme. She left Google in 2019, citing retaliation.

In parallel, Whittaker co-founded the AI Now Institute at New York University with Kate Crawford in 2017, one of the first research centres dedicated to examining the social implications of artificial intelligence, including algorithmic bias, labour impacts and the concentration of AI infrastructure among a handful of large firms. That work made her a sought-after voice on AI policy, including a stint from 2021 to 2022 as a senior adviser on AI to then-FTC Chair Lina Khan, and repeated testimony before the US Congress on facial recognition and AI ethics.

Since taking the presidency of the Signal Foundation in September 2022, Whittaker has become one of the most visible global defenders of encryption, repeatedly warning governments in the US, UK and EU against legislation that would weaken end-to-end encryption in the name of public safety. She has framed encrypted, minimal-data messaging as a direct counter-model to the surveillance-driven business practices she spent her Google career observing from the inside.

Whittaker's influence rests on a rare combination: technical credibility from years inside a data-hungry tech giant, academic standing from AI Now, and now institutional power atop Signal, giving her both the platform and the product to argue that a less extractive data economy is technically achievable, not just desirable.