Revolutionizing Privacy and AI with Meredith Whittaker

About this event

Join Signal President Meredith Whittaker and Professor Lowry Pressly for an illuminating conversation about collective action and resistance in the age of AI. For more than two decades, Whittaker has been a leading advocate for privacy and digital rights. At Signal, Whittaker drives their mission to champion user privacy, protect free expression, and enable secure global communication through open source privacy technology. She will be in conversation with Pressly, who brings expertise in the ethical and political considerations of AI, surveillance, and privacy. Together, they will discuss the growing influence of technology over our lives and challenge how we think about holding ourselves, corporations, and the government accountable.

Reception to follow

Please note that this event is in-person only, and RSVPs are requested to attend. Walk-ins are welcome.

Speaker:

🌐 Meredith Whittaker is Signal's President and a member of the Signal Foundation Board of Directors. She has over 20 years experience in tech, spanning industry, academia, and government. Before joining Signal, she was the Minderoo Research Professor at NYU, and co-founded and served as Faculty Director of the AI Now Institute. Her research and scholarly work helped shape global AI policy and shift the public narrative on AI to better recognize the surveillance business practices and concentration of industrial resources that modern AI requires. Prior to NYU, she worked at Google for over a decade, where she led product and engineering teams, founded Google's Open Research Group, and co-founded M-Lab, a globally distributed network measurement platform that now provides the world's largest source of open data on internet performance. At Google, she was one of the core organizers pushing back against the company's insufficient response to concerns about AI and its harms, and was a central organizer of the Google Walkout. She has advised the White House, the FCC, the City of New York, the European Parliament, and many other governments and civil society organizations on privacy, security, artificial intelligence, internet policy, and measurement. And she recently completed a term as Senior Advisor on AI to the Chair at the US Federal Trade Commission.

Discussant:

🌐 Lowry Pressly is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Stanford and the author of The Right to Oblivion: Privacy and the Good Life (2024), which was named a best book of the year by The New Yorker.

This event will have a photographer present to document the event.

No personal recordings (audio or visual) are allowed. By attending, you consent for your image to be used for Stanford-related promotions and materials. If you have any questions, please contact ethics-center@stanford.edu.

If you require disability-related accommodation, please contact disability.access@stanford.edu as soon as possible or at least 7 business days in advance of the event.

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Learn more about the McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society.