Whittaker: “AI agents pose profound privacy and security risks”

AI agents may be helpful in handling various online tasks, but this new paradigm of computing has a “profound issue” with privacy and security.

That’s what Meredith Whittaker, President of Signal, said during a keynote speech at the SXSW conference in Austin, Texas, last Friday.

She talked about the value AI agents offer in our daily lives. Let’s say you want to book a vacation, visit a concert, book tickets, put the events on your calendar, and message your friends that all has been taken care of. You can simply ask an AI agent to do all this for you.

Whittaker then explained the type of access the AI agent would need to accomplish these tasks, including access to your web browser, GPS coordinates, credit card information, calendar, and messaging app.

“It 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, probably in the clear, because there’s no model to do that encrypted,” Whittaker warned.

She continues by saying there’s no way this all happens on your device, but is being sent to a cloud server where it’s being processed and sent back.

“So there’s 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,” Whittaker concludes.

Because AI agents would undermine the privacy of your messages, messaging apps like Signal would never integrate with AI agents.

Last month, Whittaker lashed out at WhatsApp’s data collection practices, suggesting that the messaging app collects too much sensitive metadata.

“It tells you exactly who you’re communicating with, at what time, how often, and where you are. You can derive so much from that. WhatsApp can link that information to Facebook, to Instagram and to payment data that they could buy into. Signal simply doesn’t have all that data,” she said.

In another recent interview, Whittaker emphasized the importance of private and secure communication.

“Without private communication, there’s no military coordination, no good journalism that needs to protect its sources, no human rights work under authoritarian regimes, no confidential conversations in a corporate boardroom. When those things come under pressure, people realize how essential infrastructure like Signal is to ensure that.”