sayhar

A lot of this is flatly untrue.

How could they tell you were on that subreddit? Presumably you were doing it from a separate browser on the phone -- can they really snoop on behavior in completely separate apps?

Thank you for your service!

Thank you! (I wrote the article)

Hello, I wasn't aware we were on /r/politicalcompassmemes

dogman, thank you for the heads up about this social-cybersecurity group. It does seem related, and I'll be sure to check them out. Lately, someone has also mentioned m3aawg.org, which also seems adjacent.

Personally, I do think the field has a lot to learn from cybersecurity. From my POV, integrity work has three different 90's ancestors: web forum moderation,email/search engine antispam work, and cybersecurity mindsets like risk mitigation rather than risk elimination.

As for the PR stuff -- fair enough! We're all trying to do the best we can with the skills we have. Not every decision will be the right one. Maybe the name was one of those.

I hope you check back in with us in 6-12 months. Once you can judge us more by our work over time, I hope we will have earned your respect.

You really think Frances is a deep cover op by Facebook? Really? Wow.

Yep! We both quit FB in 2019. This has been our (full time, volunteer, spending our savings) job since ~Jan/Feb of this year.

It's taken a long time to gather people, build trust, figure out our strategy, find consensus, make our first reports, etc.

yep.

I appreciate you. Thank you.

Hi! Thanks for the constructive question. I agree with you that it's nuanced, and also I'm sad that it's getting polarized/simplified in some venues.

I don't think we have gotten an institute stance on very much relating to E2EE. Our community advisory board (composed of integrity workers) is the moral core of the organization. So far, when we say "the institute has a stance on X", that has meant "the advisory board signs off on X, and that X represents a good faith consensus view of workers in the industry".

We don't yet has a doc that lays out why we think integrity and privacy can coexist nicely. Speaking only for myself, I think the answer lies in careful design. As an example, you could see, via research and experimentation on FB Messenger, that messages that are forwarded in chains of > N are just empirically overwhelmingly likely to be bad faith, spammy, etc. You could then take that finding to WhatsApp, Signal, etc, and then bake in changes to the UX that make it slightly more annoying to forward messages if they've been on a reshare chain of N/M. That kind of stuff.

There's also some consideration to group size -- if a group is 5000 people large on, say, Telegram, it might be encrypted, but it's no longer really private. Maybe it should be treated differently? Unclear, let's think and research about it.

I think a rough consensus we might move towards is treating messaging differently than broadcast, and also treating broadcast features inside of messaging apps differently than straight up messaging themselves.

But again, those are just some of my more idle thoughts. There are members and fellows who are better experts on this particular subject than I am.

Does that make sense? Is that helpful?

This is a great example of the kind of stuff we want to be talking about and looking at. Design changes that apply across the board.

You could imagine us swapping notes, and doing some research as a group, to see if this is indeed an idea that would work. And then spreading that information to everyone, including the platforms themselves.

We started this back in January, and have been getting our ducks in a row since then. It turns out starting a nonprofit is hard, and takes a long time.