Did you know Signal’s President Unleashes Stark Warning: AI Agents Could Compromise Everything You Hold Private

 

The president for Signal issued a stark warning to the tech world yesterday about how dangerous AI agents can be. This includes a serious breach in privacy and security.

Speaking onstage at the recently held SXSW conference in Texas, she referred to the use of Agentic AI as one that was like stuffing your brain inside a jar. If that was not enough, she cautioned against the latest paradigm shift for computing, where AI executing tasks for users presents a significant challenge.  

Whittaker says AI agents are getting promoted as a great way to add value to human life, but she disagreed with the stance. Doing users' online tasks on their behalf was not as intriguing as it appears. Today, AI agents can book your tickets, schedule important calendar events, and even message friends when everything is done.

The level of access such agents require is alarming, she continued. To perform basic tasks requires a lot of personal access into the system that might cost the user in the long run. After all, the agent can even get into the browser where sensitive material like credit card details are stored.

AI models are very powerful and they link to cloud servers where the data gets processed and is returned back. Therefore, the issue is serious and can transform into something haunting. It’s a threat that can break between the app layer and the OS layer by linking all separate services and making the data muddy.

If messaging platforms such as Signal were to link to AI agents, it would undermine users’ privacy for messages. The agent ends up getting access to apps for texting, and also pulling back data to produce summaries for text.

The comments follow a series of remarks made during the panel on how the AI world was designed on surveillance models, having mass data collections. She cautioned that chasing more data in AI might be a double-edged sword with troubling effects. This can have serious consequences that she felt were not good.

With the arrival of agentic AI, the future is not safe and if you feel that a magic genie in the form of a chatbot is making your life easier, you have to remember that it’s coming at a cost of your privacy and security, she continued.