We are open to nominations for new people to join the Open Privacy Research Society’s Board of Directors!

In particular, we are looking for individuals who have experience in fundraising and organizational capacity building. But if you think you have a skill you can bring to the Open Privacy board then we really want to hear from you.

Three years ago, on February 11th 2018, we officially incorporated the Open Privacy Research Society. At that point in time I don’t think any of us had any idea how the following years would go.

2020 was difficult and challenging. The work outlined here is a fraction of what we had hoped to achieve. 2020 impacted our projects, our priorities, and our lives. That said, I think it represents some of the most important work we have done so far, and I am excited to push it as far as we can in 2021.

This work couldn’t exist without an active and amazing base of supporters, like you, who enable our mission - researching and developing privacy enhancing technologies focused on those people and communities that need them most.

To celebrate our 3rd year anniversary I would like to invite you to review some of the amazing work that you helped support in 2020 - and once again ask for your help and support to help us continue our mission in 2021.

Today we are releasing the first cut of Lockbox, an application for creating simple encrypted web forms!

Two years ago, on February 11th 2018, we officially incorporated the Open Privacy Research Society. Since then we’ve grown so much as an organization. We now have 8 board members, and 4 staff members, multiple open source projects, an office and, most importantly, an active and amazing base of supporters who enable us to do our important work - researching and developing privacy enhancing technologies focused on those people and communities that need them most.

To celebrate our 2nd year anniversary I would like to invite you to review some of the amazing work that you helped support in 2019 - and once again ask for your help and support to help us continue our mission in 2020.

Late last year we set out to find a new Staff Designer to work with us to set the direction of the look and feel of our software projects and websites.

We received many fantastic applications, and we are very excited to announce that we have now hired a Staff Designer!

Today we are proud to announce and release Cwtch Alpha 0.3.1! Featuring a first cut of profile management.

We are delighted to announce that the Zcash Foundation donated 1044.41369 ZEC (or $40,000 USD at time of donation) to the Open Privacy Research Society. We would like to send a big Thank You to the Zcash Foundation for their support!

While the donation was unrestricted, we would also like to take this opportunity to announce a number of new initiatives (some involving zcash!) that this funding will contribute to!

Vancouver, BC - The Open Privacy Research Society has received an update from Vancouver Coastal Health (VCH) after last weeks Press Release publicly disclosing that we had discovered that the sensitive medical information of patients being admitted to certain hospitals across the Greater Vancouver Area is being broadcast, unencrypted, by hospital paging systems, and that these broadcasts are trivially interceptable by anyone in the Greater Vancouver Area.

Open Privacy was founded on the belief that the world can be better. We started as a group of researchers and technologists who were frustrated by the ever growing stranglehold of surveillance capitalism and the harm it was causing marginalized and at-risk communities. We wanted to build an organization that served those that mainstream groups ignore: sex workers, queer people, those impacted by intimate parter or family abuse, and human rights activists, to name just a few.

Today we are proud to announce and release Cwtch Alpha 0.3.0 and kick off the 0.3 alpha release cycle! This release line is the first where the Android experience is now expected to work reliably alongside the desktop versions (Windows and Linux). This is the culmination of a lot of work over the past 5 months.

Vancouver, BC - The Open Privacy Research Society has discovered that the sensitive medical information of patients being admitted to certain hospitals across the Greater Vancouver Area is being broadcast, unencrypted, by hospital paging systems, and that these broadcasts are trivially interceptable by anyone in the Greater Vancouver Area.

Today we are proud to announce and release Cwtch Alpha 0.2.0 and kick off the 0.2 alpha release cycle! Some big improvements have landed since 0.1.5 both on the frontend and the backend side of things and we’ve very excited about this release! We’ll go over the changes and then talk about some of what is planned for the 0.2 cycle.

In March this year Sarah Jamie Lewis of the Open Privacy Research Society, along with Vanessa Teague (University of Melbourne), and Olivier Pereira (UCLouvain) published details of critical vulnerabilities impacting evoting systems in Switzerland and Australia. These vulnerabilities were soon confirmed by the vendor Scytl, resulting in an emergency patch being installed during an election in New South Wales, and a “temporary” suspension of evoting offerings by Swiss Post.

In June the Swiss Federal Council, citing these disclosures, delayed the introduction and evoting as an official option, and shortly after SwissPost announced that it would not be offering its system for use in the October federal elections (despite having offered it in previous elections).

Just as math can protect the speech of the marginalized from the powerful, it can also be used to prove to everyone that power is not working as it claims.

Speaking math to power works.

Today we are pleased to release Cwtch Alpha 0.1.5. Changes in this new release include:

• A progress spinner in the UI for groups indicating when they are connected but syncing with the server
• Chat text bar is locked until a peer to peer connection is established, or a group is synced
• Minor improvements in “performance” in that we removed a few threads that poll for events and replaced them with events and event handlers

Today we are pleased to release Cwtch Alpha 0.1.4. Changes in this new release include:

• Lots of UI scaling fixes that should make it more consistent and better across many displays, especially mobile
• Beginnings of Android notifications
• Big speedups to group loading (most noticeable on Android)
• Version and build date in settings

Today we are pleased to release Cwtch Alpha 0.1.3. Changes in this new release include:

• Translations support!
• Portuguese, German and French translations
• Android save user name fix
• Splash screen where needed (mostly android)
• Group membership pane

We announced the Cwtch Alpha 2 weeks ago. Since then we’ve seen many people trying Cwtch out in different ways, from building it themselves to running the supplied binaries. From this we’ve received lots of feedback in our issue tracking system. We also started using Cwtch (dog fooding) ourselves for some dev team communication.

Today we are releasing a new Cwtch alpha update, 0.1.2 that contains the following work and more:

Over the next few weeks we will be telling many of the stories of the first year of Open Privacy through releases, articles, blog posts, board member spotlights and interviews. We will also be laying out ambitious goals for the next year. Today we hear from Norman Shamas about why they are involved in Open Privacy.

Cwtch is a Welsh word roughly translating to “a hug that creates a safe place”. Cwtch is also our decentralized, privacy-preserving, asynchronous multi-party messaging protocol that can be used to build consensual applications.

What better day to launch the alpha of a project designed to bring people together safely and securely than on Valentine’s day?

Open Privacy started as a group of researchers and technologists who were frustrated by the ever growing stranglehold of surveillance capitalism and the harm it was causing marginalized and at-risk communities. We wanted to build an organization that served those that mainstream groups ignore: sex workers, queer people, those impacted by intimate parter or family abuse, and human rights activists (to name just a few).

Open Privacy believes in using and producing open source solutions and open infrastructure. Many values contribute to our belief and mandate for open solutions including preferring ownership to rent, preferring customizability and control, and desiring to share our work and results with the world. This post describes our process for building our infrastructure in the first half year of starting out as a nascent non-profit.

Open Privacy believes in empowering users in ways that enable consent to and control over the movement of their data. The ebb and flow of current communication technologies has created a situation in which users are forced to either relinquish control over their personal information to dozens of unknown companies and government agencies, or sit on the sidelines and refrain from participating in culture and public society. Worse, many tools collect information on us that can be used against us in ways that are difficult to understand or predict. Nowhere is this impact felt harder than in the marginalized communities which Open Privacy exists to serve. We see only one solution to this problem: taking our data back into our own hands, and removing the ability of service providers to see our data at all. Today we announce the first step on this long journey: Cwtch.

Cwtch (a Welsh word roughly translating to “a hug that creates a safe place”) is a decentralized, privacy-preserving, asynchronous multi-party messaging protocol that can be used to build metadata resistant applications.

Recently we filed an intervention with the CRTC opposing the Fairplay website-blocking proposal. We believe that the CRTC’s acceptance of this proposal would pose a dire threat to Canadian Internet users’ privacy and access to information. In this post we break down our intervention and explain why we filed it, and why we believe there is much more to be done.

OPEN PRIVACY CALLS ON CRTC TO ADOPT MANILA PRINCIPLES

Vancouver, BC — Open Privacy Research Society, a new Canadian not-for-profit group based in Vancouver, has filed an intervention in the CRTC’s hearing on ISP-blocking application by urging the CRTC to endorse the Manila Principles on Intermediary Liability.

The Manila Principles are an international charter. They set out principles to help ensure efforts to involve intermediaries, like ISPs, in the content they carry – like requiring them to create kill switches to block some content – respect users’ rights, including freedom of expression and the right to privacy.

Privacy is Consent. Privacy is the right to consent. Privacy is the right to withdraw consent.

The Open Privacy Research Society (Open Privacy for short) is a non-profit Canadian group based in Vancouver, British Columbia. We believe that moral systems enable consent. Our society exists to invent, create, build, test, deploy, promote, and to encourage the development of such systems.