Can we train and foster a worldwide community of citizen scientists -- certified mobile app safety inspectors--to collect the data needed to generate accurate safety labels for mobile apps? Can this community effectively shift the balance of power through app behavior transparency? We think we can, and we think it might be the only way to keep on top of the growing invisible risks in constantly changing mobile apps.
Safetypedia is a pilot project Internet Safety Labs (ISL) has been running for several months. The purpose of this session is to expose the project to a larger, worldwide community, solicit participants, and to foster dialogue on the approach. In particular in this session we will:
- Explain ISL's mobile app safety labels as seen on appmicroscope.org (example app: https://appmicroscope.org/app/1579/ ),
- Explain the Safetypedia project,
- Explain the ISL safety inspector certification process,
- Demonstrate the Safetypedia data collection portal,
- Explain how safety labels are generated as a combination of automations plus human research,
- Share the results of the pilot to date--how many trained and certified inspectors, how many safety labels generated,
- Discuss viability of the project as a sustainable transparency intervention, subverting deliberate opacity and mysticism surrounding technology.
Lisa LeVasseur is the founder, Executive Director, and Research Director of Internet Safety Labs, a non-profit independent digital product safety testing organization. With more than three decades in industry, her formative years were spent at Motorola as a software engineer developing embedded software for mobile phone infrastructure. While there, she developed a passion for software product management and a particular fondness for industry standards. Building on that foundation along with her unique education of dual bachelor's degrees in computer science and philosophy and an MBA Lisa is grateful to be able to serve society by championing product safety for the digital age.