# "Why Privacy Starts with Consent, Not Code", - Tessa Brown CEO & co-founder of Germ Network - Channel: [Ethereum Cypherpunk Congress](https://streameth.org/ethereum-cypherpunk-congress) - Date: 2025-11-09 - Duration: 16:16 - Topics: web3, privacy, now, crypto, cryptography, blockchain, data, security, human right, rights, tech, technology, internet, open source, free, freedom, ethereum, hackers, ethics, cypherpunk, dev, developer, dapp, decentralization, bitcoin, computer, surveillance, cyber, peer2peer, p2p, love, solidity, zk, zero knowledge, education, academy, w3pn, Education - Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-0KzYtw0py4M - YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0KzYtw0py4M ## Description In this Privacy Academy Interview, Tessa Brown, CEO & co-founder of Germ Network, shares her unlikely path from creative writing and academia to building an end-to-end encrypted messenger. She talks about designing communication tools that respect consent, the importance of fun and accessibility in privacy tech, and how human-centered design can bridge the gap between creative culture and deep tech. Germ Network lets you connect without phone numbers, control who can reach you, and even chat privately via your Bluesky handle. Timecodes 00:00 – Introduction: Who is Tessa Brown & what is Germ Network 00:35 – What Germ does: End-to-end encrypted messaging & Bluesky integration 01:25 – From creative writing & academia to building deep tech 02:40 – How privacy and writing intersect: ownership, authorship & control 03:40 – The advertising model & how it manipulates relationships 04:35 – Why communication tools should be built around encryption 05:30 – The bridge between humanities & engineering: learning from both sides 06:40 – Accessibility, fun & why privacy tech must meet people where they are 07:45 – Becoming an entrepreneur: bravery, community & building in public 09:00 – Gender, queerness & diversity in tech and privacy spaces 10:25 – Rethinking privacy through interpersonal consent & boundaries 11:50 – Dreaming the future: a consensual internet where you control your access 13:00 – What being a “cypherpunk” means today 14:15 – Cultural picks: Octavia Butler, Orwell, sci-fi & finding focus in the attention economy 15:45 – Closing thoughts: privacy, joy & control in a distracted world .. This conversation is part of Privacy Academy Interviews – a peer-to-peer knowledge project exploring the most important ideas in Web3, privacy, and digital freedom. Learn more: https://academy.web3privacy.info A W3PN Media House production. Directed by Federico Marchi https://x.com/BabyBitProd Interview by Peter Farbey https://x.com/0xfarbey Let privacy be with you! ## Transcript Hi, I'm Tessa Brown. I am the CEO and co-founder of Germ Network. We are an end-to-end encrypted messenger that gives you more control over what you share and who can find you. And now featuring an integration with your Blue Sky handle. >> Hi Tessa. Hi. Thanks for coming. >> Thanks for having me. >> Yeah. Uh can you tell like super briefly about your project about germ like how is it going now and like what was the purpose of it like when you started that? >> Sure. So I am Tessa Brown. I'm the CEO and co-founder of Germ Network. My co-founder and CTO Mark Schwez also around here at this privacy retreat. Um, GERM is an end-to-end encrypted messenger that gives people more control over what information they share with whom, how people can find them, and how long those connections last. So, it's built on a multi-identity system that's not connected to phone numbers at all. And our identities also integrate with external platforms. So, we just shipped an integration with Blue Skyy's app protocol that lets you exchange end-to-end encrypted DMs with your friends from Blue Sky and the atmosphere. >> Wow, that's great. Uh, but can you tell us like really really briefly your your like how did you did you end up doing that because I know a bit of your background. It's really non tech. Yeah. And it's very interesting how like non tech person start to do something like really deep deep tech. >> I feel very lucky. It's a really unusual tech journey. I think I came from writing. I was a creative writer. I got into writing education. I always used a lot of new media in my classrooms with my students. I was a lecturer last at Stanford. And I was learning and teaching about how young people in movements and in popular culture and subcultures use writing to make change in the world. And you know as a writer privacy and ownership of your files and your documents is really important. So I was aware of the ways that writing tools in the cloud were taking away my sense of ownership of my own documents. But then also studying social media started seeing the ways that the advertising model was hacking our relationships, hacking our connections, creating conflict between each other and got very focused on the idea of a social media service that was built around endto-end encrypted messaging because that is where healthy relationships form. when we know that we're talking directly to each other and we're not being manipulated or surveiled. >> Yeah, that's nice. And what do you think uh like more tech people, engineers and developers can learn from like creative writings like what is the intersection there? Uh because you have a lot of people who are more techy in their background who will watch that. So in Tumblr they're not really aware of like what is that like what is the intersection between this um human rights tech and creative writing. >> I love that question. I mean my co-founder came from privacy engineering. He was the privacy engineer at Apple for all of their endto-end encrypted products. >> iMessage, FaceTime, advanced data protection. You know, ultimately these are all communication technologies. The more time I spend with software engineers, I have found that actually you guys write a lot. You communicate a lot. Everyone's online writing in forums all the time. And the more that engineers know about how these systems work, I think folks just have the technical literacy to understand that we're being surveiled and our communications are being processed all the time. And so I have found that engineers don't necessarily care about privacy more than like lay people, but they understand what's going on and so they're making different layers of decisions. Um, you know, I'm always in favor of interdisciplinary conversations and us learning from different sides of campus, different, you know, public sector, private sector, because obviously I studied communication from a humanities and social science perspective, but my co-founder is a technologist and a software engineer. And between the two of us, we can make exciting interoperable protocol-based services, but also make sure that they're built around real people's everyday needs to control what they're sharing and that it's really easy to use and really grounded in how people use their technology. >> Yeah. And what do you think that what maybe advantages you have comparing to like tech people because of your like uh because of your background? Uh because it's also not very obvious like how something creative or how how art background can help like this tech world. Um how do you feel that? >> I think I'm still figuring it out. But I mean becoming an entrepreneur has been a really unexpected journey and being an expert in learning science I think has helped me make sense of just what I'm learning and stay on top of it. >> But I would say just talking to people and being really invested in talking to people and listening to them really respecting their experiences of their problems. I find that sometimes in the privacy world, we can make sort of orthodox technical decisions that are not accessible for people. And for me, I think my grounding in education in the humanities, that's all about accessibility and making sure that you meet people where they are and you're serving their need and and you're helping them be excited because you can never bully someone into adopting a technology. We still have to make it attractive and fun. And so making empowering technology feel as easy and fun as the disempowering technologies that are all around us. I hope that's something that I can bring to this work. >> Yeah, 100%. I'm sure because it's like very techy and not like sexy, right? There is no ex often. It's so you can you can >> put there some a bit of human touch. >> Yes, exactly. I think that's super important in our field where which is very a lot of ratio you know um okay but uh in your uh journey of becoming an entrepreneur like what obstacles you had to overcome to become who you are now because it's not an easy way right >> I think just learning to be really brave and have a lot of conviction in what I was building even just to meet my cop co-founder. I was building in public, talking about how I wanted to build something based around endto-end encrypted messaging. He and I actually met on Twitter because I was hosting audio rooms talking about different topics and articles that I was reading and that seemed important to opportunities and challenges in terms of what new technology was was out there and was needed. Um, I I think of myself as an outgoing person. I feel like entrepreneurs are extremely outgoing and you just have to continually be talking to people, networking, sharing your ideas with folks, getting feedback. And so, just really leaning into that process every day because academia actually half of the time you're working quietly by yourself. So really like leaning into this community element and just being forward with what our goals are and what we're trying to do has been one of the biggest learnings I would say. >> I Okay. And uh Okay. Gender question. How how do you feel in this really male dominated tech space? Um how do you feel it personally? And um is are there any ways to make it more like less less male dominant like more diverse? >> Mhm. >> I think I mean there's a few ways that I feel like being a woman and being a queer woman has shaped my experience of building privacy technology. I think a lot of times in the privacy world just in terms of our product itself and how we conceive of it. Sometimes the privacy threat model is like big brother government surveillance hacking. And I think there's a big opportunity to serve interpersonal boundaries and interpersonal privacy concerns. So like a young woman that doesn't want to give her phone number to some person that she just met that maybe she wants to go out with or maybe she doesn't. But so often today we have to give all of our information at once as soon as you want to be digitally connected with someone. So we're thinking a lot about these interpersonal dynamics that I think are a bit of a gender lens on what privacy means. Um, you know, I think that people there's something about having been an academic and a humanist and then also being a woman that I feel like is somehow a double whammy against me. And it's just made me more motivated to master the craft of entrepreneurship and go in there and nail my pitch and nail my talking points. And it's funny too because my co-founder Mark is a brilliant, brilliant technologist. He's also kind of shy and so I'm the one that's sort of out there bragging about him. Um, one thing he said to me when we started working together was that it made sense to him that a communications expert should run a communications platform. And that was something that made me feel so much respect from him about my expertise. So I feel like for women in the space, just finding collaborators that really respect you and value what you know and then hopefully the entire community can just continue to, you know, do the affirmative work to make sure that there's diversity in our gatherings and how we're positioning our resources. >> Yeah, thanks for sharing. I think it's very inspirational for a lot of like people of like different backgrounds and genders just to like join the space and not to be afraid because there's obviously some sort of gap in between like tech space and like diverse crowd. Um okay let's talk about bright future imagine we are like I don't know 10 years um here and everyone is using German network the all communications are private secure there is no big brother how do you imagine this world like beautiful future when we won uh how would it look like and what's going to be different >> I think the dream 10 years from now when you know billions of people are using our germ protocol is that you will never feel afraid that when you give someone your contact information that they have access to you that you can never retract. So whether that's a person that you meet, a conference mailing list that you join, a restaurant that you make a reservation at, a shoot store that you order a pair of shoes from, that you always are in control of how you are granting access to yourself, and that we live in a world of digital relationships that are consensual, that are continually consensual, and if we don't want to be a part of them anymore, we can retract ourselves. And part of consent is that it creates space for fun as well. When we consent to things, it means that we want to be there. We want to be doing it. So, it's easier actually to join a chat or start talking to somebody that you just met at a party because you don't have to worry about the downstream dangers of giving your contact away. >> Yep, totally makes sense. I I wish we we will be there soon. >> I hope so. We're working on it. >> Okay. Um I think the last question um your hot take on cyher punk because it's a hot topic now. It's just what do you think cypher punk is and um maybe you consider yourself a cy punk and like how do you become one? >> I think I'm more of a cyber punk after this weekend. Um you know we're living in really high stakes times. digital freedoms, freedom of expression is going backwards in most of the world. So I feel that just standing up for freedom of speech, standing up for human rights is becoming more punk, more countercultural, and it's a resistance posture just to defend basic freedoms that all of us have been raised with an expectation of. So I feel like we're all pokes now. >> Wow, that's a beautiful answer. I totally agree. Yeah, because we have this white swing we are having now. It's so intense and it's Yeah, it's so easy like basic stuff is growing is becoming revolutionary. >> Yes. >> Weird times. >> Yes. Yes. I mean stuff that was just mainstream a few years ago is now, you know, radical. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Uh okay, last quick thing. Maybe um your your your recommendation on a piece of like art, literature or something that will reach someone's life. Maybe in terms of privacy, cyber punk, or maybe in general. >> I've been reading a lot of dystopian fiction over the last few years. I like books that are honest about the world that we're living in. Um, books by Octavia Butler or Nanetti Oaraphor. I've been reading some more George Orwell lately. I've been watching a lot of sci-fi like Murderbot and Silo. I think you know there's best case scenarios and worst case scenarios in all of those. But I'm I'm a reader. I always came from reading and writing. So for me and especially with all of the dopamine driving services that are in my phone, going back to holding books has been important um in this moment. >> Oh, then it's going to be the very last question that interests me as well a lot. How do you manage to be concentrated on a book in our age of like digital disturbance and really ADHD attention? It takes intentionality, but I'm also a very strong proponent of not reading books that you don't like. There are a lot of books out there. If you don't like it, put it down. Go read another one. You can find one. I mean, sometimes, you know, give it 10 pages, give it 20 pages, but I feel a good book should make you want to read it and not put it down. >> Fair enough. Okay. Thanks for coming. >> Thank you. >> Thanks for watching. We wish you to read some nice book and read it to the end and hope you will enjoy this process >> and then try germ and DM me. >> Okay, ciao.