We need Diversity in the Room - the words of a cryptographer - Ying Tong

[Music] we need diversity in the room from that Workshop I interacted with people who have on the ground experience who have deployed something IRL um and yeah these included defense attorneys activists organizers standards bodies um and a lot of human computer interface designers so these interactions help us to discover knowledge gaps understanding gaps and to understand problems in context to understand why people might have some attitudes and beliefs that they have um another thing that was really valuable and special was the interdisciplinary perspectives so there were it wasn't just computer scientists and cryptographers there were a lot of um anthropologists in the room there were a bunch of attorneys legal experts um and so they bring a different perspective because they they think of things for example through the lens of power dynamics and that revealed like the the assumptions behind um who we assume as the adversary um and they also taught me a lot of cool legal hacks so it's only by talking with people from different fields that we can find the these overlaps um and that we can actually be creative um in these zones of overlap and yeah the last thing about diversity in the room is just talking to real people I guess this is the same as the first point but um yeah I I I think it Bears repeating cuz I don't think I've talked to a real person in two years um and um yeah like outside of our bubble outside of our privacy cult there's a A diversity of um opinions and perceptions about privacy and um there's also a bunch of different threat models like we can't always assume that we're capturing people's concerns in our threat models um the holder issue or verifier thing is one example the air tax um is another example um so like for example yes stalking victims um for example marginalized people who are surveilled all of these threat models are not ours and it's only by talking with real people that we can learn them and begin to accurately model them so I think that's all I had yeah thanks so much for listening my rent [Applause] [Music]