With generous support from the Rose Foundation, we were able to partner with superbloom on development of a Digital Rights Tool. Prior to design, user interviews were conducted to solicit feedback as to what privacy protecting measures they might be taking online (if any), and interviewed subject matter experts and community leaders as to their thoughts on why more people aren’t taking action to protect their privacy, and how we might overcome that inertia. Most readers of this newsletter likely understand the opt-in vs. opt-out debate, and have heard many of us preach about “privacy by design” because of this very issue.

One of the more illuminating responses we received was that advocates aren’t doing a good job of raising awareness.

“A lack of effective narratives around the impacts of privacy was a commonly cited issue in the space. Multiple interviewees said that they had waited for the earth-shattering stories that they expected would rouse people from their indifference (Snowden, Cambridge Analytica, etc), but that they didn’t affect the individual-level change that they expected. One expert said that the privacy advocacy space has “come up with zero real-world harm stories” which he cited as one of the great issues in their work, as they’re not adequately prepared to explain to people why these things matter.”

For Secure Justice, this is a call to action to be better at crystalizing the real-world privacy infringing harms that we have plenty of examples of to share.

A big thank you to the team we worked with at superbloom: Georgia Bullen, Philliph Drummond, and Katie Wilson.

Get the slide deck summary here.

Get the full report here.