Manual introduction

Aims of the manual

This manual is the result of a conversation among XXXXXXXXX about what does it mean to include a gender perspective into privacy and digital security. It addresses the basics for a better management of our identity online and how to build and promote safe spaces on the internet and in the physical world. Because we understand that packing those fast evolving privacy and digital security practices into our already very busy lives as human rights defenders and activists is not an easy task, we believe in the importance of crafting collective mechanisms of support to keep advancing together, empower each other and zen in order to have our tech working for us.

Storytelling and documentation of practices and experiences are key for achieving social transformation. The inventivity, creativity and knowledge happening on the ground when developing appropriated and liberating technologies to ensure gender justice, privacy and security should be honored and shared. To do so, the diversity and heterogeneity of experiences deriving from our daily practices with technologies (be those digital or social ones) need to include all parts involved at every step of the technological cycle. From dreaming technologies to developing those, from using them to contributing to their governance. Imagining liberating technologies that encompass a feminist Internet where everybody is truly welcomed and respected is not a women and trans persons only task, it is a duty for anybody involved in creating an inclusive, accessible, decentralised and neutral internet.

In a nutshell, including gender into privacy and security requires to engage with the diversity of cultures, social status, gender identification, sexual orientations, race, ethnicities and other power structures that create various forms and levels of inequality for individuals and communities into their access to security tools and practices. Enabling enthusiasm for privacy and digital security practices encompass an integrated approach linking those to our well being and physical security as human right defenders and our feminists and queer activism. By exposing the many invisible contributions that sustain digital security communities, avoiding frustrated expectations, gaining self confidence and losing fear through Do It With Others processes, gender and cultural diversity on those fields can be included. Accordingly, adapted, updated and targeted resources and training methodologies focusing on specific threats and strengths is required in order to activate curiosity and better understanding through contextual references.

Gender roles are sets of societal norms dictating what types of behaviors are generally considered acceptable for a person in relation to their actual or perceived biological sex. These are usually centered around binary conceptions of femininity and masculinity, although there are myriad variations and gray scales in between. The first step for including gender consists in acknowledging the gender roles that society attribute to us at birth and during the rest of our lives and that generate stereotypes that can become prejudices. Latter can result into specific threats and violences against women, queer or non binary persons along the technological cycle. Gender gaps, discrimination and specific Violence Against Women are happening along the process in a structural way that influence our experience of/with ICT.

Because of all this, including gender is also about asking ourselves when we choose to use a specific technology if those are liberating or alienating ones for other groups and individuals. Liberating technologies could be defined as appropriated technologies that do not harm and are fairly produced and distributed, are rooted in the free software and free culture principles and are designed by default against gender based violence, surveillance, opacity and programmed obsolescence.

Nowadays, what is closer to feminist and liberating practices on the Internet are 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 are about the ways in which the Internet can be a transformative public and political space for women, trans-persons, queer, feminists. It situates 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 corporation, to control women and trans-persons bodies and thoughts.

What is this manual about?

The internet is an amazing space to explore, learn, speak up, listen and communicate with people across the world. Unfortunately, it has also become a contentious space. There is a pushback against people who speak against, question or challenge dominant discourses, moreover if those deal with gender and sexual orientations. When planning to be active on the internet as a vocal women, a woman human rights defender, a trans-persons and/or a feminist it’s a good idea to start from an assessment of the traces we leave behind us on the Internet, our digital shadow and the social domains that are spread across our online and physical activities. These two aspects can tell very accurate stories about us; who we are, were we live and hang out, what we are interested in and who our friends are. Because those traces and on-line identity can expose us to several threats, this manual is about presenting you different strategies you can adopt and tools you can use in order to shape or control your digital shadow and social domains in order to obtain a greater privacy and security on-line. The first part of this manual will enable you to understand the traces you leave behind on the Internet, your digital shadow and metadata, which are the risks and empowering potential of different on-line identities (real names, pseudonyms, collective names and anonymity), how you can create new on-line identities and manage alone or with others various on-line identities.

Once, you have learn about the possible impact your online identities can have on your life, work and activism, and how you can develop strategies and use tools to mitigate possible risks and enhance possible strengths, the manual will introduce you to how build safe spaces for you and your organisation, but also how to develop safe spaces and spaces of resistance in mixed environments. Finally it will present how to create safe spaces in the physical world where women and trans persons can learn about privacy, digital security and technologies in general in order to get empowered and further contribute to those fields. Safe spaces have been used by marginalized groups and communities for many decades now. They have been a way to care for one-self and for a collective, to design and craft strategies and tactics of resistance and to create an oasis of peace in what sometimes can be a tiring struggle for resistance. Safe spaces have taken different meanings and bear different names depending on a variety of factors be it geographical, temporal, spatial, cultural and social, among others. This chapter will enable you to become a moderator well aware of fundamentals of net-etiquette and how to contribute to the creation and enforcement of social rules within online communities. You will learn the fundamentals about how to build Safe spaces online and offline, gain knowledge on process and methodologies to reclaim and resist into mixed environments spaced and become aware of current initiatives and processes that can be replicated in your community, organization, collective in order to become a safer space.