Police have used the “very legitimate complaint” the public has with big tech companies like Meta about data collection and surveillance as a pretext to undermine user privacy, the president of encrypted messaging app Signal has said.
Meredith Whittaker told Guardian Australia that it had become “an easy victory with few political consequences” for politicians to attack Facebook in the last decade, and while there was a legitimate public backlash against the “mass surveillance technology business model” , the political response a “very unfortunate way.”
“Instead of targeting the root of these harms, the power concentrated at the heart of the platform monopoly, the mass surveillance that is the engine of this business model, collecting enormous amounts of data on people, using it to target ads , to train artificial intelligence models, to manipulate and influence people to spend more and more time on the platform and the ad-clicking service… we see efforts almost to extend this surveillance and this monitoring and give to governments a part of it,” he said.
“It’s almost as if a very legitimate grievance has become a pretext to do what the authorities have wanted all along while ignoring the core of the problem and, in some ways, even exacerbating it.”
Signal has been considered the best-known dedicated encrypted messaging service since its launch in 2018. Whittaker has been president since 2022, at a time when countries such as Australia, the UK and the US were pushing back against companies of technology that encrypted the private communications of its users. Encrypted communications make it impossible not only for companies themselves to see what is being said, but also for authorities.
Meta, in particular, has come under heavy criticism from lawmakers for encrypting its messaging services end-to-end last year. In Australia, although encryption-breaking laws have barely been used in law enforcement since 2018, authorities are calling on technology companies to do more. Proposed online safety rules could force companies to do what is “technically feasible” to detect child abuse material being shared on encrypted messaging services.
Whittaker rejected the idea that this was a debate between lawmakers and technology companies. It’s existential for Signal, he said.
“We have been constantly trying to clarify the technical reality and what is at stake in the proposals that are being put forward, which are (to) ‘put lipstick on a mass surveillance proposal and say that it is not actually undermining privacy.’ “, said. saying.
“That doesn’t work for us. We need to live in the realm of technical reality.”
He said there was no way to implement what was requested in a way that preserved user privacy.
“We are talking about a kind of paradox that denies itself. “You can’t do mass surveillance in private, period.”
Whittaker spoke to Guardian Australia ahead of a talk at the Wheeler Center in Melbourne next week, and met with the Australian eSafety commissioner’s office this week to set out Signal’s position on the proposals to the regulator.
Whittaker said Signal was offering its technical expertise to “cut through the mud” of the debate, noting there had been a lot of lobbying on the issue from other organisations.
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“There are a lot of self-interested tech organizations that are selling what amounts to snake oil… (They) tend to claim that because mass surveillance systems are implemented before encryption occurs, they do not undermine the encryption.
“It’s about word games, it’s not really a technical evaluation.”
Signal would not comply with mass surveillance mandates in countries where it becomes law, he confirmed, and while the company would fight the laws, it would “cease operations” without a second thought if there was no other option.
“We would not do this lightly and will fight to the end to ensure that as many people as possible around the world have access to meaningful privacy,” Whittaker said.
At the same time that regulators in Western countries are pushing for more invasive surveillance powers for encrypted communications, there is a separate effort to ban TikTok in countries like Australia over concerns that the company will be forced to comply with privacy laws. China’s national security and deliver users. data.
Whittaker said he had watched that debate with dismay.
“The issue is not simply that ‘mass surveillance is bad’ when it is done by a state with which we compete,” he said.
“Simply scapegoating one platform, which is ultimately doing what every other platform does simply in another relationship with another government, does not solve this problem.”