The risk isn’t that Signal itself will add AI features, it’s more that it will be built-in to your OS that’s running Signal (Apple Intelligence, Windows Recall, etc). These types watch everything you do on-device by default and learn a ton from your E2EE messages regardless of the intentions of the Signal devs.
dangus|10 months ago
Apple Intelligence as an example only seems to be reading information from Apple’s own default apps as of today, and their developer documentation suggests that capabilities require developers to implement features via their APIs.
It isn’t really a correct read of the situation to say that Apple Intelligence is “watching everything you do” like a service that is just watching your screen output at all times.
Even the service that does do that exact sort of thing (Windows Recall) has an extensive set of controls around filtering out specific apps and private browsing mode and other sensitive information, enabled by default: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/privacy-and-cont...
So I think the reality is that a lot of the big players making this technology recognize the privacy and security concerns and are designing their AI applications to address those concerns.
I personally feel like AI products are frequently launching with more transparency about data usage than a lot of Web 2.0 era applications like Facebook.