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Reposted by Meredith Whittaker

Maria Farrell @mariafarrell.bsky.social · 1d

FWIW I've written to the Irish Minister for Justice - an enthusiastic supporter of Europe's hideous "chat control" phone-scanning proposal - asking him to imagine when that technology is used against him.

If you're German, please, PLEASE write to your justice/interior minister today.

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Reposted by Meredith Whittaker

ctrlaltwin.bsky.social @ctrlaltwin.bsky.social · 1d

I think you completely misunderstand what this bill represents. Read up on it www.patrick-breyer.de/en/posts/cha...

Chat Control: The EU's CSAM scanner proposal

🇫🇷 French: Traduction du dossier Chat Control 2.0, stopchatcontrol.fr🇸🇪 Swedish: Chat Control 2.0🇩🇰 Danish: chatcontrol.dk🇳🇱 Dutch: Chatcontrole The End of the Privacy of Digital Cor...

www.patrick-breyer.de

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Reposted by Meredith Whittaker

Fight Chat Control @fightchatcontrol.bsky.social · 1d

Take action!

fightchatcontrol.eu to contact your ministers, permanent representation, MEPs, and, if you are German or Italian, your national MPs!

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Gabriel @gm0stache.tigerente.dev · 1d

feel free to join this petition against #chatcontrol here:

weact.campact.de/petitions/ch...

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Reposted by Meredith Whittaker

olgacronin.bsky.social @olgacronin.bsky.social · 2d

Here's a video explaining how Chat Control surveillance would work by the Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy...

fair.tube/w/72DCPMByyS...

#speirgorm

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Meredith Whittaker @meredithmeredith.bsky.social · 2d

The debate may, but my arguments don't. In fact, they are made with exacting attention to power and how our current tech ecosystem shifts it, and to/from whom.

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Meredith Whittaker @meredithmeredith.bsky.social · 2d

There are many guys with wild views from the early days of commercial networked computation. And? Still not an argument.

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Reposted by Meredith Whittaker

Meredith Whittaker @meredithmeredith.bsky.social · 2d

No, my message is that govs are containers for power, which can be exercised brutally or w wisdom, & tech is a collection of methods that can be abused or leveraged for good.

TLDR tech and gov aren't stable categories. Validate both (like, by examining Signal's open source code) before you trust.

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Reposted by Meredith Whittaker

Doug Saunders @dougsaunders.bsky.social · 2d

This is an EU proposed policy with the benign-sounding name "Child Sexual Abuse Regulation" which proposes to screen private online communications using sketchy image-scanning algorithms. It is technically unworkable, and would be a privacy catastrophe, especially for those in authoritarian states

Meredith Whittaker @meredithmeredith.bsky.social · 2d

📣 Germany's close to reversing its opposition to mass surveillance & private message scanning, & backing the Chat Control bill. This could end private comms-& Signal-in the EU.

Time's short and they're counting on obscurity: please let German politicians know how horrifying their reversal would be.

Signal @signal.org · 5d

We are alarmed by reports that Germany is on the verge of a catastrophic about-face, reversing its longstanding and principled opposition to the EU’s Chat Control proposal which, if passed, could spell the end of the right to privacy in Europe. signal.org/blog/pdfs/ge...

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Meredith Whittaker @meredithmeredith.bsky.social · 2d

This is a collection of facts, some of them a bit fuzzy, but w/e. It's not an argument, though.

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Meredith Whittaker @meredithmeredith.bsky.social · 2d

No, my message is that govs are containers for power, which can be exercised brutally or w wisdom, & tech is a collection of methods that can be abused or leveraged for good.

TLDR tech and gov aren't stable categories. Validate both (like, by examining Signal's open source code) before you trust.

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Meredith Whittaker @meredithmeredith.bsky.social · 2d

Re-read, that's not my argument.

My argument is that the architectural shift you gesture to needs to be understood as the novel and alarming shift to mass surveillance that has been instrumented via the commercialization of networked comms, over the last ~3 decades.

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Meredith Whittaker @meredithmeredith.bsky.social · 2d

OK, by this logic...the surveillance of every facet of life--from comms to movement to social relationships to etc--which has become the norm over the last decades c/o the surveillance biz model, makes LE surveillance MORE possible than it's ever been in history.

But somehow e2ee is the problem?

Wessel van Rensburg @wildebees.bsky.social · 2d

The problem with digital speech activists’ one sided framing of this debate is that they don’t acknowledge that digital architecture has shifted what is possible. End-to-end encryption makes it impossible for law enforcement to do targeted surveillance, just as lack of it makes filtering trivial.

Meredith Whittaker @meredithmeredith.bsky.social · 2d

📣 Germany's close to reversing its opposition to mass surveillance & private message scanning, & backing the Chat Control bill. This could end private comms-& Signal-in the EU.

Time's short and they're counting on obscurity: please let German politicians know how horrifying their reversal would be.

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Meredith Whittaker @meredithmeredith.bsky.social · 2d

📣 Germany's close to reversing its opposition to mass surveillance & private message scanning, & backing the Chat Control bill. This could end private comms-& Signal-in the EU.

Time's short and they're counting on obscurity: please let German politicians know how horrifying their reversal would be.

Signal @signal.org · 5d

We are alarmed by reports that Germany is on the verge of a catastrophic about-face, reversing its longstanding and principled opposition to the EU’s Chat Control proposal which, if passed, could spell the end of the right to privacy in Europe. signal.org/blog/pdfs/ge...

signal.org

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John Scott-Railton @jsrailton.bsky.social · 3d

NEW: breach of Discord age verification data.

Including some users passports & DLs

Age verification is a badly implemented data grab wrapped in a moral panic.

Mark my words, as age verification mandates expand, we'll end up more surveilled and less secure. 1/

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Signal @signal.org · 5d

We are alarmed by reports that Germany is on the verge of a catastrophic about-face, reversing its longstanding and principled opposition to the EU’s Chat Control proposal which, if passed, could spell the end of the right to privacy in Europe. signal.org/blog/pdfs/ge...

signal.org

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Meredith Whittaker @meredithmeredith.bsky.social · 6d

I joke because haha vibe work AND the history of labor automation being applied to justify paying the workers subject to it less/treating them poorly is clear and consistent and not up for debate. So I'm also serious.

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Meredith Whittaker @meredithmeredith.bsky.social · 6d

Setting the table for vibe paychecks

www.theverge.com/news/787076/...

Microsoft launches ‘vibe working’ in Excel and Word

Vibe working is all about Office’s new Agent Mode.

www.theverge.com

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Reposted by Meredith Whittaker

CCC @ccc.de · 7d

Messenger-App Signal: Meredith Whittaker kritisiert Pläne der EU zur #Chatkontrolle und droht, mit dem Messenger dann den europäischen Markt zu verlassen www.heise.de/news/Chefin-...

WhatsApp-Konkurrent Signal droht mit Rückzug aus Europa

Signal gilt als einer der sichersten Messenger. Die App könnte aber in Europa vom Markt verschwinden, falls sich die Chatkontrolle in der EU durchsetzt.

www.heise.de

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Reposted by Meredith Whittaker

Gaël Varoquaux @gaelvaroquaux.bsky.social · 7d

For more details, @sashamtl.bsky.social , @meredithmeredith.bsky.social and myself wrote a paper about the bigger-is-better narrative in AI, documenting its fragile grounding and the consequences:
dl.acm.org/doi/full/10....

Hype, Sustainability, and the Price of the Bigger-is-Better Paradigm in AI | Proceedings of the 2025 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency

dl.acm.org

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Reposted by Meredith Whittaker

Signal News & Tips @aboutsignal.com · 8d

New video about Signal📽️

Signal's President @meredithmeredith.bsky.social on reclaiming privacy in the age of AI

Watch it here 🍿👉 aboutsignal.com/videos-podca...

Organized by Publix & @algorithmwatch.org

#signal #signalapp #signalmessenger #AI #privacy

The individual in the machine: Meredith Whittaker on reclaiming privacy in the age of AI - AboutSignal.com

Meredith Whittaker, President of Signal, explores how digital sovereignty and AI hype risk undermining privacy and what it takes to realign technology with human needs.

aboutsignal.com

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Meredith Whittaker @meredithmeredith.bsky.social · 10d

Or, at least difficult more iconically

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Meredith Whittaker @meredithmeredith.bsky.social · 11d

I aspire to this

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Reposted by Meredith Whittaker

Heather Burns @heatherburnstech.bsky.social · 11d

Over the years, Michelle Visage on RuPaul’s Drag Race has dropped some iconic looks, but 1980s Long Island @meredithmeredith.bsky.social is going in the pantheon.

Michelle on Drag Race UK looking fierce and 1980s and hopefully sending Viola safely through to the next week

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Meredith Whittaker @meredithmeredith.bsky.social · 12d

Haha, NGL it's pretty chill.

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