Applications are now closed.
Tech companies play an increasingly important role in how societies function; thus, tech companies must be subject to effective public oversight. Whistleblowing has been a critical avenue for such oversight. For example, Frances Haugen, a former Facebook employee, disclosed that Facebook’s algorithms prioritize engagement over safety, leading to the spread of misinformation and hate speech and adversely affecting teen mental health. Ifeoma Ozoma, who worked at Pinterest, highlighted issues of racial discrimination and unequal pay within the company, and she advocated for legislative changes to protect whistleblowers from non-disclosure agreements. Peter “Mudge” Zatko, former head of security at Twitter, alleged that the company hid severe cybersecurity weaknesses from the public and its own board, potentially impacting national security and user privacy.
Whistleblowers provide critical transparency into how tech companies operate, but whistleblowers face a variety of technical and legal challenges. For example, whistleblowers need ways to securely communicate with journalists, regulators, and other members of the public; unfortunately, current platforms for anonymous messaging and bulk data transfer suffer from various problems involving efficiency, usability, and security. These problems are compounded by the fact that whistleblowers from historically disenfranchised groups often lack equitable access to the resources (legal, technological, and otherwise) needed to safely disclose information and prevent employer retaliation.
The Applied Social Media Lab (ASML), in partnership with Harvard’s Institute for Rebooting Social Media (RSM) at the Berkman Klein Center, invites engineers, designers, policy experts, civil society advocates, and entrepreneurs to a one-day workshop to imagine new technology for supporting whistleblowers.
Participants will collaborate with the Institute faculty and the ASML team to produce a survey document that outlines concrete deficiencies of current whistleblowing systems; the document will also propose designs for new technological approaches and human-level processes that will improve the lived experiences of whistleblowers. The document will provide helpful guidance as ASML ramps up its engineering and broader collaborative efforts in the whistleblowing space and other areas of public interest tech. In addition to producing this survey, the event aims to nurture a professional community focused on (re)building social media to serve democracy and the public interest.
As a starting point for additional brainstorming, the project will examine “off-the-shelf” whistleblowing platforms like SecureDrop, FaceUp, and CaseIQ, as well as academic whistleblowing work like Callisto [1][2] and academic research for storing and analyzing encrypted data (e.g., CryptDB, DEFY). The program will also invite real whistleblowers and the external parties that assisted those whistleblowers to chat, determining pain points with current whistleblowing tools.
If you want to help us build a community of technologists who work for the public interest, this workshop might be for you!
Participants will be prompted to join in person OR virtually on March 6th, from 11 AM to 4 PM EST. Note: The format and timing of this workshop (fully virtual or entirely in-person) will be crafted based on the cohort’s availability and interest. See application form for more details.
Application Deadline: February 17th February 19th
Cohort Confirmation: February 21st
