Language: English (mozilla)
Consumers are increasingly using encrypted messaging apps to share information, engage with one another, and conduct commerce. But while the promise of encrypted messaging is private communications and user control over the spread of personal information, the reality is more complicated. An overlapping and interconnected set of engineering, design, and system factors, coupled with varied user behaviors, create the conditions for individuals to subvert their own interests or the interests of their communities on encrypted apps.
In this workshop, participants will collaboratively identify how design failures, dark patterns and adversarial behaviors by various parties may combine to produce malicious effects in encrypted messaging. Such malicious effects may be patterns that nudge users to share personal information or forward messages to insecure channels, suggestive user interfaces or flawed security mechanisms that can compromise security. What are the design choices app makers have made that lead to or confuse the user into making poor security decisions? Are there insecure apps that use security UI to look more secure than they are? How does this relate to content moderation capabilities on messaging apps? How do people end up compromising their own safety? What is the prevalence of these phenomena, and what are the policy solutions?
This workshop is split into Two parts: Part 1 is a presentation on our preliminary research.
In Part 2, the facilitators will break the participants into 2-3 groups. Each group is given a specific prompt or question to work on, and then everyone comes back together to share findings, questions, and suggestions. For example, one group may focus on messaging forwarding within Telegram or Signal, another group may focus on Facebook messaging when messages have tens and 100s of participants.
Caroline Sinders is an award winning critical designer, researcher, and artist. She's the founder of Convocation Research + Design. For the past few years, she has been examining the intersections of artificial intelligence, intersectional justice, systems design, harm, and politics in digital conversational spaces and technology platforms. She has worked with the United Nations, Amnesty International, IBM Watson, the Wikimedia Foundation, and others. Sinders has held fellowships with the Harvard Kennedy School, Google’s PAIR (People and Artificial Intelligence Research group), Ars Electronica’s AI Lab, the Weizenbaum Institute, the Mozilla Foundation, Pioneer Works, Eyebeam, Ars Electronica, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the Sci Art Resonances program with the European Commission, and the International Center of Photography. Sinders holds a Masters from New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program.
Justin Hendrix is CEO and Editor of Tech Policy Press, a new nonprofit media venture concerned with the intersection of technology and democracy. Previously, he was Executive Director of NYC Media Lab. He spent over a decade at The Economist in roles including Vice President, Business Development & Innovation. He is an associate research scientist and adjunct professor at NYU Tandon School of Engineering. Opinions expressed here are his own.