News

Advances in generative AI have dramatically lowered the barriers to creating and distributing sexual “deepfakes” or non-consensual intimate images (NCII) — a form of technology-facilitated gender-based violence (TFGBV) that disproportionately targets women and marginalized populations. Yet as the technology enabling NCII scales, the online reporting systems meant to address it remain opaque, inconsistent, and burdensome for survivors. Absent clear structural changes to platform design — changes we anticipate would align with the legislative intent of the United States’ TAKE IT DOWN Act and complementary regulations in the United Kingdom and other global contexts — the current approach maintains… Read more: WHITE PAPER: Mapping the Burden: Toward Survivor-Centered Reporting Systems and Policies for Non-Consensual Intimate Images

Note: The views expressed are those of the student author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society or the Applied Social Media Lab. This blog post is not a peer‑reviewed academic publication, and the empirical estimates and interpretations presented here may change as validation and review proceed. ​​ Somewhere right now, someone is clicking “I agree” without reading a word. That’s not surprising. If the average American read the privacy policy for every website they visit, it would take about 40 minutes a day, every day for a year (McDonald… Read more: Reading Between the Lines: How Platform Policies Construct Power

When RightsCon 2026 was suddenly cancelled last week, we were in the final stages of preparing two sessions: Who Checks Big Tech?, a roundtable co-hosted with Psst.org on our collaboration to build novel tools for whistleblowers; and Rules of Engagement, a tech demo of Transparency Hub, a platform that archives privacy policies from over 300 social media companies.   Three members of the ASML team were also preparing to fly to Lusaka to join the conference in-person. We were excited to share our work, to meet our Psst collaborators in-person for the first time, to connect with Berkman Klein… Read more: ASML’s RightsCon 2026 Update

Frankly, ASML’s video-based civic discourse platform, is at the center of a new initiative that has been awarded a grant aimed at exploring how AI can improve how we engage in dialogue and make decisions at scale. 

Psst is a nonprofit dedicated to creating safer channels for collective whistleblowing. For 4 months in 2025, ASML partnered with Psst to develop novel whistleblowing technologies. We built two things: first, a set of prototypes for employment verification, to enable a whistleblower to prove that they work at a particular company without revealing personal information (e.g., their name); and second, a new storage system for securely holding disclosures until multiple similar tips are identified—i.e., until the whistleblowers will have strength in numbers. Below, we describe what we built and why we built it. We are also excited to… Read more: How ASML and Psst collaborated to reclaim identity from platforms 

Join ASML as we explore the future of digital identity and celebrate the launch of Keyring.

This content is password protected.

Attending the 2025 Global Digital Collaboration (GDC) Conference in Geneva, Switzerland was a powerful opportunity to connect technical research with global digital governance efforts. Representing the Applied Social Media Lab, I co-led a session with the Project Liberty Institute focused on the intersection of decentralized identity, governance, and privacy-preserving technologies. Our session brought together technical and governance perspectives. Project Liberty explored participatory governance models for protocols like DSNP, while I contributed an engineering lens—highlighting our Advanced Digital Identity work on age verification using zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs) and the importance of protocol interoperability across decentralized platforms. Throughout the convening,… Read more: ASML presents at the Global Digital Collaboration Conference in Geneva 

The Linux Foundation sustains critical open-source infrastructure, from the Linux Kernel to decentralized identity standards. The Applied Social Media Lab participated in several discussions during the Foundation’s Summit Week in Napa, California, including the Summit on Human Agency (H2H), the Linux Foundation Member Summit, and a Linux Kernel maintainers workshop, engaging the builders and maintainers of the First Person ecosystem in the shared question: how do we build trust infrastructure for a world where AI agents and humans act alongside each other in open-source ecosystems?  The Summit on Human Agency convened researchers, technologists, and policymakers to examine how identity,… Read more: ASML presents at the Linux Foundation Summit Week

The 2026 First Person Project Summit held in Seattle brought together builders and researchers to establish a global infrastructure for social verification, led by the First Person Project. At the Summit, the Applied Social Media Lab presented a live demonstration of the ASML Wallet to technologists, governance leaders, and community builders working on digital trust and decentralized systems. The session focused on how individuals can use the ASML Wallet to form verifiable, privacy-preserving connections with people they meet—such as at events or within shared communities—and carry those connections forward as durable, user-controlled signals of trust.  We invited participants… Read more: ASML presents at the 2026 First Person Project Summit

ASML’s Transparency Hub provides access to policy documents from hundreds of companies, giving users the ability to directly compare and track how policies change over time and understand how social media platforms use data.

ASML partnered with Boston University’s Spark! Program to develop a Policy Analytics Dashboard based on the Lab’s Transparency Hub.

Join ASML for the launch of Transparency Hub, a new platform designed to compare the data practices of consumer-facing social and technology applications. 

BKC’s Applied Social Media Lab opened its doors to the public in December to learn more about the Lab’s ongoing work in public interest tech.

Join ASML on Thursday, December 4 for the 2025 Synthesizer & Open Showcase.