‘You cannot do mass surveillance privately, full stop’: Signal boss hits out at government encryption-busting moves

A legitimate grievance' with big tech firms is being used by police as a pretext to undermine privacy, Meredith Whittaker says

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Police have used the very legitimate grievance" the public has with large tech companies like Meta about data collection and surveillance as a pretext to undermine user privacy, the president of encrypted messaging app Signal has said.

Meredith Whittaker told Guardian Australia that it had become an easy win with few political consequences" for politicians to beat up on Facebook in the past decade, and while there was legitimate public backlash against the mass surveillance tech business model" the policy response had a very unfortunate shape".