Revision as of 16:30, 29 May 2015

This manual came out of the Gender and Technology Institute, organised by Tactical Technology Collective and the Association for Progressive Communications (APC) at the end of 2014. The event brought together almost 80 participants and facilitators, mostly from the Global South, to focus on some of the issues faced daily by women and trans* persons on the internet and to share strategies and tools for better protecting our privacy and security online.

Since then, the network has expanded, with the result that this manual has involved the input and review of a wide range of people, and is informed by the stories and creative practices of grassroots activists working all over the world, many of whom have been using and developing alternative technologies for some time. The manual's strength is rooted in the diversity of the knowledge and experience on which it is based, derived from a wide variety of relationships to technologies in order to tackle gender based violence and advance gender social justice around the world.

Safeguarding our privacy and security includes gaining some control over our digital traces, shadows and identities online; as well as building and promoting safe spaces both online and in the physical world.

The first part of the manual looks at the information traces you leave behind on the Internet, and offer various strategies and tools available for taking control of these traces. It presents what metadata and digital shadows are, and why these matter; how you can minimise, create and manage new online identities; and what are the risks and potentials involved in using different types of identities such as anonymity, pseudonyms, collective names and real names.

The second part focus on safe spaces - how to build those, both online and offline, for you and your organisation; how to develop spaces of resistance in mixed environments; and how to create those in the physical world where women and trans*persons can learn about privacy, digital security and technologies in order to be empowered and further contribute to those fields.

Both parts introduce cases studies that illustrate the different dimensions addressed. Those initiatives are there to enlarge your comprehension about how strategies and tools can be applied on the ground as overcoming gender based online violence is also highly contextual and thus can take many different forms and shapes and how those smart and creative solutions can become an inspiration for your own organisations and communities.

Including privacy and digital security practices into our already very busy lives is not an easy task. This makes creating and maintaining collective mechanisms of support all the more important. In the end, we want to support and learn from each other - all the while keeping it zen so that our tech works for us, and not the other way round. We also need to take an integrated approach, linking our practices to our well being (self-care) and physical security.

While we're reading this manual (and putting some of what's in it into practice), it's important to keep some things in mind.

Including gender into privacy and security requires us to take an intersectional approach - one that engages with a diversity of culture, social status, gender identification, sexual orientation, race, ethnicity and other power structures that create inequality for individuals and communities with regard to their access to security tools and practices. Besides, this is also based on the recognition that specific forms of violence against women, trans*, and queer persons happen in a structural way along the entirety of the technological cycle - from the moment a specific form of technology is assembled, to its usage, right through to its disposal. If this particular manual is, of course not able to address the entire scope of this; it is nonetheless useful to keep the big picture in mind. This includes:

• Acknowledging that gender gaps, discrimination and gender-based violence are structural, and influence the conditions of women,trans* and queer persons in relation to their experience of and with ICTs.
• Understanding how different women in different conditions find ways of accessing technologies, and how they can protect themselves and others in the process.
• Tackling specific forms of gender-based online violence, sharing skills and knowledge on the ground so that women, trans* and queer persons can protect and strengthen their freedom of opinion and expression.
• Remembering it is important to make women, trans* and queer experiences in the management and development of technologies visible (not just the digital ones, but also appropriated ones like health and self-care technologies for instance).
• Working to enable a greater participation of women, trans* and queer persons in institutions which contribute to the governance of internet, as well as inside companies and organisations delivering services which support our networking and online identity.
• Imagining liberating technologies where everybody is truly welcomed and respected is not work for women and trans* persons only, it is the responsibility of anybody involved in creating an inclusive,accessible, decentralised and neutral internet.

With these points in mind, we should ask ourselves when choosing to use a specific technology, if this technology is liberating or alienating for other groups and individuals. Liberating technologies can be defined as appropriated technologies that do not harm and are fairly produced and distributed; that are rooted in free and open-source software and free culture principles; and that are designed by default against gender based violence, surveillance, opacity and programmed obsolescence.

Because of these, it's important to have a look at the Feminist Principles on the Internet developed by the Association for Progressive Communications (APC) in 2014, when they gathered a group of woman human rights defenders and feminist activists to a Global Meeting on Gender, Sexuality and the Internet, with the mandate to come up with a first list of principles. Those look at the ways in which the internet can be a transformative public and political space for women, trans* and queer persons, and feminists. They place tech-related violence on the continuum of gender-based violence, making clear the structural aspect of violence linking, expanding and/or mirroring online attitudes with offline prejudices. The principles also highlight surveillance and lack of privacy as patriarchal tools, whether they are used by the state, private individuals or corporations; used to control women's and trans* persons' bodies and thoughts.

This manual is written for anybody that is interested in including gender with an intersectional approach to digital security and privacy practices. It is divided into two parts. First, there is a shorter printed (and PDF) version which can easily be read from a relaxed and horizontal position. It provides an easy going introduction to the essential elements of how to include gender in privacy and digital security practices. Second there is a wiki, for which you might have to sit up to read. It goes more in depth and at more length in explaining concepts on how to manage identities online and build safe spaces, in addition to giving examples and instructions on how to turn abstract concepts into practice. The wiki will continue to be added to by the community from the Gender and Tech Institute. We intend it to be a repository of critical resources for women's human rights defenders and activists from the global south and the global north.