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   Agentic AI has profound issues with security and privacy, Signal President   
   says   
      
   Date:   
   Mon, 10 Mar 2025 10:45:59 +0000   
      
   Description:   
   Signal President Meredith Whittaker warns agentic AI comes with some   
   concerning risks.   
      
   FULL STORY   
      
   The president of popular messaging app Signal has warned AI agents come with    
   a significant risk to privacy and security, which is haunting the hype around   
   agentic AI.    
      
   Speaking at SXSW, Meredith Whittaker argued AI agents are being marketed like   
   a "magic genie bot which thinks many steps ahead and completes tasks for   
   users, so, your brain can sit in a jar, and youre not doing any of that   
   yourself.    
      
   But this comes at a cost, and although the use of AI agents is proving    
   popular , Whittaker emphasized that theres a real danger with these bots,   
   because they require extensive access to user data.   
      
   Excessive access    
      
   Say you asked an AI agent to book a concert for you and your friends - this   
   should be a fairly straightforward task, but it does mean the AI agent would   
   need access to your browser, your credit card information, your calendar, and   
   even your messages to let the friends know.    
      
   This all means that with just one task, the agent now has access to your   
   financial details, your day to day plans, and your messages - which could be   
   extremely damaging if the data fell into the wrong hands.    
      
   "It would need to be able to drive that across our entire system with   
   something that looks like root permission, accessing every single one of    
   those databases, probably in the clear because there's no model to do that   
   encrypted," Whittaker explained.    
      
   Messaging apps like Signal which have end-to-end encryption (E2EE) would   
   compromise the privacy of user messages if integrated with AI agents, even if   
   this was just to text friends or summarize your incoming messages, she noted.    
      
   Thats almost certainly being sent to a cloud server where its being processed   
   and sent back, Whittaker adds. So theres a profound issue with security and   
   privacy that is haunting this hype around agents, and that is ultimately   
   threatening to break the blood-brain barrier between the application layer    
   and the OS layer by conjoining all of these separate services [and] muddying   
   their data,    
      
   Via TechCrunch   
      
   ======================================================================   
   Link to news story:   
   https://www.techradar.com/pro/security/agentic-ai-has-profound-issues-with-sec   
   urity-and-privacy-signal-president-says   
      
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