{"id":656265,"date":"2025-03-08T10:00:10","date_gmt":"2025-03-08T07:00:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/signal-president-meredith-whittaker-calls-out-agentic-ai-as-having-profound-security-and-privacy-issues\/"},"modified":"2025-03-08T10:00:10","modified_gmt":"2025-03-08T07:00:10","slug":"signal-president-meredith-whittaker-calls-out-agentic-ai-as-having-profound-security-and-privacy-issues","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/signal-president-meredith-whittaker-calls-out-agentic-ai-as-having-profound-security-and-privacy-issues\/","title":{"rendered":"#Signal President Meredith Whittaker calls out agentic AI as having ‘profound’ security and privacy issues"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Signal President Meredith Whittaker warned Friday that agentic AI could come with a risk to user privacy.<\/p>\n

Speaking onstage at the SXSW conference in Austin, Texas, the advocate for secure communications referred to the use of AI agents as \u201cputting your brain in a jar,\u201d and cautioned that this new paradigm of computing \u2014 where AI performs tasks on users\u2019 behalf \u2014 has a \u201cprofound issue\u201d with both privacy and security.<\/p>\n

Whittaker explained how AI agents are being marketed as a way to add value to your life by handling various online tasks for the user. For instance, AI agents would be able to take on tasks like looking up concerts, booking tickets, scheduling the event on your calendar, and messaging your friends that it\u2019s booked.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo we can just put our brain in a jar because the thing is doing that and we don\u2019t have to touch it, right?,\u201d Whittaker mused.<\/p>\n

Then she explained the type of access the AI agent would need to perform these tasks, including access to our web browser and a way to drive it as well as access to our credit card information to pay for tickets, our calendar, and messaging app<\/a> to send the text to your friends.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt would need to be able to drive that [process] across our entire system with something that looks like root permission, accessing every single one of those databases \u2014 probably in the clear, because there\u2019s no model to do that encrypted,\u201d Whittaker warned. <\/p>\n

\u201cAnd if we\u2019re talking about a sufficiently powerful \u2026 AI model that\u2019s powering that, there\u2019s no way that\u2019s happening on device,\u201d she continued. \u201cThat\u2019s almost certainly being sent to a cloud server where it\u2019s being processed and sent back. So there\u2019s a profound issue with security and privacy that is haunting this hype around agents, and that is ultimately threatening to break the blood-brain barrier between the application layer and the OS layer by conjoining all of these separate services [and] muddying their data,\u201d Whittaker concluded.<\/p>\n

If a messaging app like Signal were to integrate with AI agents, it would undermine the privacy of your messages, she said. The agent has to access the app to text your friends and also pull data back to summarize those texts.<\/p>\n

Her comments followed remarks she made earlier during the panel on how the AI industry had been built on a surveillance model with mass data collection. She said that the \u201cbigger is better AI paradigm\u201d \u2014 meaning the more data, the better \u2014 had potential consequences that she didn\u2019t think were good. <\/p>\n

With agentic AI, Whittaker warned we\u2019d further undermine privacy and security in the name of a \u201cmagic genie bot that\u2019s going to take care of the exigencies of life,\u201d she concluded. <\/p>\n

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Source<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Signal President Meredith Whittaker warned Friday that agentic AI could come with a risk to user privacy. Speaking onstage at the SXSW conference in Austin, Texas, the advocate for secure communications referred to the use of AI agents as \u201cputting your brain in a jar,\u201d and cautioned that this new paradigm of computing \u2014 where…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":656266,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/techcrunch.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/03\/Meredith-Whittaker-sxsw-2025.jpg?resize=1200,654","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[77337,151873,154772,90583,39230],"class_list":["post-656265","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-technology","tag-ai","tag-ai-agents","tag-meredith-whittaker","tag-signal","tag-sxsw"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/656265","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=656265"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/656265\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/656266"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=656265"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=656265"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=656265"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}