“Your brains are being put in a bank.” Signal President predicts “profound” security and privacy issues with AI agents
Signal President Meredith Whittaker believes that agent-based AI could pose a risk to user privacy.
Signal President Meredith Whittaker believes that agent-based AI could pose a risk to user privacy.
Speaking from the stage at the SXSW conference in Austin, Texas, the advocate for secure communications called the use of AI agents «putting your brain in a jar» and warned that this new computing paradigm, where AI performs tasks on behalf of users, has a «deep problem» with privacy and security.
Whittaker explained that AI agents are being marketed as a way to add value to your life by performing various online tasks for the user. For example, AI agents will be able to perform tasks like finding concerts, booking tickets, scheduling an event on your calendar, and notifying your friends that it’s booked.
«So we can just put our brains in a jar, right?» Whittaker is quoted as saying by Techcrunch.
She then explained what type of access an AI agent would need to perform these tasks, including access to our web browser and how to control it, as well as access to credit card information to pay for tickets, your calendar, and your messaging app to text your friends.
«He would have to be able to control this process across our entire system with something that looks like root permission, accessing each of these databases — probably openly, because there is no model that does it encrypted,» Whittaker warns.
«And if we’re talking about a fairly powerful… AI model that does this, it can’t happen on the device,» she continued. «It’s almost certainly being sent to a cloud server, processed, and sent back. So there’s a deep security and privacy issue that’s haunting this hype around agents, and that ultimately threatens to break down the barrier between the application layer and the operating system layer, bringing all these separate services together and mixing their data,» Whittaker concluded.
She said that if a messaging app like Signal were to integrate with AI agents, it would undermine the privacy of your messages. The agent would need access to the app to message your friends, as well as to retrieve data to summarize those texts.
Her comments followed remarks she made earlier in the discussion that the AI industry was built on a surveillance model with massive data collection. She noted that the «more is better» paradigm of AI — meaning the more data, the better — has potential consequences that she believes are not good.
Whittaker warned that with agent-based AI, we will further undermine privacy and security in the name of «a magical genie bot that will take care of life’s necessities,» she concluded.
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