In an interview with Bloomberg, the CEO of Signal Meredith Whittaker, speaking about chat robots like ChatGPT, Claude, said that users should not treat such systems as “friends” or subjectivity. She focused her discussions on the issues of privacy and competence, arguing that such tools, once in-depth access to personal services, would rapidly magnify risks.

Whittaker talks about AI using boundaries.

Whittaker states that she will use AI tools herself in a few scenarios, such as organizing document formats, but will not refer questions, reflections and writing to models. She stated that she did not want a system that generated answers based on established information to replace a process of reflection that should have been done by individuals.

Concerned about cross-application access to sensitive privileges

She also responded to a previous idea put forward by Microsoft AI Manager Mustafa Suleyman that users could have Microsoft Copilot buy for Christmas. Whittaker believes that if this is to happen, the system needs to read a large amount of personal information and operate between multiple services.

  • Credit card and payment information
  • Browser Access Record
  • Signal Communication Content and Contacts

In addition to the above-mentioned information, such systems may also have access to home addresses, calendar arrangements and send messages to relatives and friends instead of users. In her view, this is no longer an aid to the use of a single tool, but a wide range of applications and services.

Signal regards such access as a back door risk

Whittaker further indicated that if a similar capability were introduced into a encrypted communication product such as Signal, it would almost amount to setting a “back door” from a product safety point of view. In this way, she stressed that the closer the AI Assistant function is to the chargé d ' affaires and agent execution, the more attention the user needs to focus on what privileges it actually receives.

This statement also reflects an ongoing controversy in the AI Assistant Competition: The conflict between convenience and privacy protection becomes more direct when the product moves from answering questions to replacing the user.