Meredith Whittaker awarded honorary doctorate by VU Amsterdam

Meredith Whittaker, the head of the messaging app Signal, has been awarded an honorary doctorate by the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VU). The university recognized her as a champion of privacy and digital rights, describing her work as groundbreaking.

Whittaker is noted for demonstrating that a non-profit platform prioritizing user privacy can compete with profit-driven tech giants. The VU highlighted her role in the critical debate regarding the power of big tech companies, which often collect personal data to influence human behavior. Signal currently serves between 70 and 100 million monthly active users.

Whittaker’s career includes working at Google from 2006 to 2019, where she was an organizer of the 2018 Google Walkout. She is also a co-founder of the AI Now Institute at New York University, which examines the social implications of artificial intelligence. She is scheduled to receive the honor on November 19.