Deface

How can we bring some degree of privacy to social media timelines?

The recent democratization of encrypted messaging (e.g Signal, Wire) has helped protecting the communications of millions of people. Conversely, other areas of our digital lives have seen little progress when it comes to privacy. Social media feeds is one them. Given their open nature, how can we bring some degree of privacy to public conversations?

Deface piggybacks on Facebook and obfuscates timeline content: it makes user messages costly for computers to read, while preserving people's user experience.

Deface currently exists as a Chrome extension prototype, and we expect to release the application to the public some time in 2019. In the meantime, you can you can follow progress and contribute to the project on Gitlab.

Find Deface on Gitlab

We need your help! 🚀🌟

Deface is an open source effort, and we're actively looking for help in several tracks of work listed below. If your profile doesn't fit in these categories, we would still love to hear from you: admin@deface.app. We’re committed to assembling a diverse set of voices and skill sets, and to providing a safe space for conversation.

🐝 Community organizers & activists

Before releasing Deface to the public, we want to identify communities that are vulnerable to surveillance and could benefit from this work. We hope to work together to find out if Deface can support them, and how they can be best served.

🐜 Grant program managers

Deface has been a self-initiated, self-funded project since the beginning. If you know of a grant or fellowship program who would be interested in supporting us, please be in touch. Compensating our contributors matters to us.

🦜 Copywriters & translators

Encryption technology is not very exciting to most people, which is why we feel it is critical to make it more approachable for a diverse audience.

🐒 Social science researchers

Deface poses several social and ethical challenges. We need help identifying and mitigating risks posed to vulnerable communities. We want to develop a framework for responsible data use, and document our findings.

🦢 Designers

Deface's interface is still in its infancy. Eventually we would love to add in-app security information, guarantee accessibility, and provide recovery features. We would also like to create engaging video content to communicate why this project is necessary, and how it works.

🦑 Information security experts

We're looking to connect with security researchers and cryptographers in order to confirm the viability of our design. Currently, we need help modeling the impact of proof-of-work obfuscation on Facebook data processing capabilities.

🐿 Web & mobile app engineers

We need to design and implement a DOM manipulation system that's robust. In the longer run, we also need to port Deface to mobile platforms, where most users consume social media content. Check out deface repositories on Gitlab to get started.

Be in touch: admin@deface.app.

(We're also on Twitter)

deface

Deface prevents Facebook from reading your messages.