Web Summit speaker hit out at Big Tech 'surveillance business model'

Katherine Maher, chief executive officer of Web Summit, has said she is confident Big Tech firms will return to the event.  Photo: Zed Jameson/Bloomberg via Getty Images

The influence of Big Tech firms such as Meta and X has been criticised by high-profile speakers at the Web Summit event in Lisbon.

Signal Foundation president, Meredith Whittaker, specifically hit out at Facebook owner Meta's "surveillance business model".

Meta was one of the biggest names listed to attend Web Summit but the company backed out of the event this year after it became embroiled in controversy when former CEO Paddy Cosgrave posted about his views on the Israel-Hamas war on X.

Ms Whittaker said: “We should not have centralised, for-profit social media platforms, full stop. So Facebook goes away.”

Ms Whittaker is at the helm of the not-for-profit Signal Foundation which operates the encrypted Signal messenger app and is considered something of a contrarian in the tech space. She organised the 2018 Google staff walk-outs and has voiced concern about the intrusive nature of Big Tech firms.

“Because tech has such a global and significant reach, one jurisdiction can do a lot to shape technology even if it’s not in the US,” she said at the trade show. She said regulations in one jurisdiction could have a "profound effect in shaping how these companies behave".

Ms Whittaker suggested the best way to regulate tech firms is for jurisdictions, including Europe and the US, to form regulations together.

She added:

We have entrenched the surveillance business model so heavily into our economies, into our infrastructures, and our governments that we actually have to go back and do some disarmament.

Ms Whittaker also said she believes unionisation has become the best way of forcing these companies to regulate, especially when it comes to the treatment of workers amid the emergence of AI. The tech slowdown post-pandemic resulted in more than 200,000 redundancies across the globe and thousands of cuts in Ireland.

Earlier this week, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales took a verbal swing at X, formerly Twitter, and its owner Elon Musk, saying the platform is “not really a great source of truth”. Mr Musk earlier this month offered to pay €1bn if the business changed its name to Dickipedia.

Wikipedia’s public funding model has drawn a lot of attention but Mr Wales said “there’s a lot of reasons why our existing models are quite healthy”. He added that having one main source of funding coming from one entity could impact the business.

This Web Summit has put the behaviours of some Big Tech firms under the microscope, while many are absent from the event this year.

Newly appointed CEO Katherine Maher has said she is confident those companies will return.