2024-12-27 –, Saal 1
Language: English
A debut of new research and analysis, focused on emotions and the affective register—love! shame! intimacy!
What happens when we put love and intimacy at the center of our understanding of privacy, and what are the consequences of their disavowal, in favor of a more familiar technocratic definition of privacy-as-absense? What role does our deep desire for love and belonging, and our concomitant fear of shame and rejection, have to do with the (mis)direction of tech capital and the current, warped shape of the tech industry and its products? We take these questions seriously, and work through their implications together in Hamburg during that brief, liminal window between the winter holidays and the new year.
Meredith Whittaker is Signal's President and a member of the Signal Foundation Board of Directors. She has nearly 20 years of experience in tech, spanning industry, academia, and government. Before joining Signal as President, she was the Minderoo Research Professor at NYU, and served as the Faculty Director of the AI Now Institute which she co-founded. 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. She also helped lead organizing 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.