The 404 Media Podcast REPLAY: Signal's Meredith Whittaker on Backdoors and AI
24 snips
Dec 31, 2025 
Meredith Whittaker, president of the Signal Foundation and a key advocate for privacy, dives deep into the crucial topics surrounding encryption and security. She discusses the alarming threats AI poses to end-to-end encryption and explains what backdoors really mean for user privacy. Whittaker emphasizes the need for transparency in legal requests and critiques the normalization of surveillance. With her insights, she showcases how the fight for secure communication is pivotal for democracy, especially as the landscape evolves.
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User Growth Is Event-Driven
- Signal's user base is volatile and grows around political or privacy events.
- Meredith says Signal has about 200 million Play Store downloads and overall growth trends point up.
Match Features To Local Communication
- Build features that match local communication norms to drive adoption.
- Meredith recommends making Signal useful in region-specific ways so people bring their networks with them.
WhatsApp Terms Change Spurred Mass Migration
- WhatsApp's 2021 terms change drove a massive Signal surge that effectively DDoSed Signal's servers.
- Meredith recounts being number one in app stores across 70 countries after the outage recovery.