Meredith Whittaker

Meredith Whittaker is President of Signal, the non-profit secure communications platform relied on by journalists, human rights defenders, public officials, and millions of users globally. Under her leadership, Signal operates without tracking users or monetising personal data. Privacy is enforced through the system’s design, rather than promised through terms or settings.

Whittaker came to technology through an arts and humanities education, joining Google in 2006 and spending more than a decade inside the company as it scaled into one of the most powerful institutions of the modern economy. 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 open dataset on internet performance.

In 2016, Meredith Whittaker co-founded the AI Now Institute at New York University, the first university-based research institute to examine artificial intelligence through social, political, and economic lenses. As Faculty Director and later Chief Advisor, Whittaker helped establish AI Now as a serious counterweight to industry-led narratives focusing on questions of power, governance, labour, market concentration, and accountability, rather than abstraction or hype.

Meredith Whittaker has advised the White House, the Federal Trade Commission, the Federal Communications Commission, the European Parliament, and multiple national and municipal governments on AI, privacy, security, and internet policy. She served as Chief AI Advisor to FTC Chair Lina Khan, bringing technical fluency and institutional knowledge to competition and enforcement at a moment of renewed regulatory scrutiny.

Across her work, Whittaker argues that systems that mediate communication, knowledge, and coordination are systems of power. Her leadership is defined by her insistence on limits. Who collects data, who benefits from it, and who bears the consequences when private life is rendered legible to markets or states. In an era of expanding computational reach, Meredith Whittaker has become one of the most credible and clear-eyed voices arguing that privacy is not a nostalgic ideal, but a condition for autonomy, dissent, and democratic society.