Resources for the global digital safety training community.
Credits
Last Updated 2017-06In this session, participants will focus on the apps and online platforms they use most – you will help them to identify the kinds of information shared with these platforms, and to strategize tactics for using them safely in their personal activities and online activism.
This session was developed for, and should be attributed to, the Institute for War & Peace Reporting resource “Cyberwomen: Holistic Digital Security Training Curriculum for Women Human Rights Defenders” under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International CC BY-SA 4.0 License
Step 1 | Ask participants to go through all the apps they have on their devices and check the following:
Step 2 | Give participants approximately 15 minutes to do the above. Once time is up, ask participants to share what they found in this quick search. Make sure that you cover issues such as:
Step 3 | Share examples of “menstruapps” - menstrual cycle tracking apps - and other personal health related apps with the group. Explain how according to research that has been done (via Chupadatos: https://chupadados.codingrights.org/es/menstruapps-como-transformar-sua-menstruacao-em-dinheiro-para-os-outros/), it’s been shown that menstruapps can gather quite a bit of personal data from users:
That’s a lot of information, right?
Step 4 | Split participants into groups of 3-4 participants (maximum) and ask each group to make a list of what they know about Facebook and Google – to provide an example, you can have them start buy answering these questions:
Give participants 15 minutes to finish listing all the information they have.
Step 5 | Once time is up, ask each group to then make a list of what these two companies, Facebook and Google, might know about them. If participants have access to internet from their computers or mobile devices:
Step 6 | For this next part of the session, keep participants in their present groups – you will give each group a question to discuss and work on together (taking from the list below):
Have each group take about 10-15 minutes to answer their question; once time is up, ask each group to share their conclusions with the rest of the participants.
Step 7 | Together as a group, take 5-10 minutes to reflect on how these same social networking platforms also serve as gathering places for many online users – as such, they seem to be ideal places to implement campaigning efforts. Ultimately, Facebook and the various services offered by Google provide different useful ways to interact with followers and community members; therefore, despite some of the concerns or disadvantages of these platforms, it’s important to remember that many participants may still want to use them to reach out to their audiences.
Step 8 | You’ll now lead participants through the final closing portion of the session. Explain that you will now look at ways to reclaim privacy online, by learning how to continue using these apps, online platforms and social networking sites for personal use or advocacy efforts, but in a safer way.
Step 9 | With participants remaining in the same groups as before, ask them to now focus on collaboratively brainstorming creative ways to reclaim their privacy. Give each group a block of post-it notes along with some markers and pens, and have them generate as many ideas as they can think of in 10-15 minutes. You can provide some example tactics to get them started, such as:
Once they’ve finished this final part of the exercise, have each group share some of the ideas they came up with – you can post these in a visible place in the training room for participants to refer to as they move through the training process. These ideas will also be useful for you as you adjust the content of your training, especially if participants want to focus more on improving their safe use of social networks for their activism.