Meredith Whittaker is President of Signal, the encrypted-messaging nonprofit, and a member of the Signal Foundation board. Before Signal she was Faculty Director of the AI Now Institute, which she co-founded at New York University, where her scholarship helped shift public understanding of AI toward its reliance on surveillance business models and on a heavy concentration of computing and data resources.
Whittaker spent over a decade at Google, where she led product and engineering teams, founded the company’s Open Research Group, and co-founded M-Lab, a network-measurement platform that became one of the largest open sources of data on internet performance. She was also a central organizer of the 2018 Google Walkout, which raised employee concerns about the company’s conduct and its AI work. Her foundation bio notes she has advised the White House, the FCC, and the European Parliament, and completed a term as Senior Advisor on AI to the chair of the U.S. Federal Trade Commission.
Her recurring argument is that modern AI is not a neutral technical advance but the product of a specific industry structure built on mass data collection and a few dominant firms. For a general reader, Whittaker is a leading example of a technologist-turned-critic who moved from inside the largest AI companies to running privacy infrastructure and challenging the incentives of the field.