About Us
I remember how proud I was when Mark Zuckerberg first pledged to “connect the world.”
As an intern at Facebook in 2008, I saw the incredible possibilities of reconnecting with old friends, making new ones, and contributing to the knowledge of humanity. But then, something strange happened — connected to a part of the mission few remember. The part that came right before connecting the world: “making it more open.” And more open the world became.
Now, more than ten years later, we’re encouraged to share our sleep scores with our boss on Slack, broadcast our split bills on Venmo, post our guilty pleasure restaurant reviews on DoorDash, and of course, share all those vacation pictures too — lest people think we’re dead. Why share with just friends, our platforms ask, when you can earn likes from the entire world?
Public has become our default, and it’s no small task to change it back. Pages upon pages of incomprehensible settings stand between you and making your digital world a little bit smaller. While some of this data might seem pretty innocuous, when made public it can collectively paint a pretty accurate picture of our lives. And now, more and more of us share horror stories of being targeted online or in person, each and every day.
Is this just the new normal? Or can we hope for more from our new digital world?
We believe the solution isn’t to quit social media, as some advise — diminishing our voices and isolating those who might need connection most — but a restructure of how we think about privacy online. Not as an opt-in, but as an opt-out. Not as a mandate requested by Legal teams… but as an ethical standard we’re proud to uphold.
There are many reasons to care about Block Party’s mission to create a safer online experience, but for me, it’s also very personal. I hardly have the words to convey what it’s like to live the consequences of a broken, lawless Internet that enables any annoying or awful account, person or bot, individually or coordinated en-masse, to violate your digital presence.
This is why we created Privacy Party — the world’s simplest way to check your settings on top platforms, and even tighten your privacy controls with a few clicks. Privacy Party is a desktop browser extension: one of the only remaining ways we are permitted to support users who want simpler control of their digital sphere. (And even then, some extensions get banned by Big Tech! We’re crossing our fingers…)
Privacy Party works by navigating and clicking for you right before your eyes — finding all the hidden controls, toggles, and audience selectors it might take hours to sleuth out otherwise. And not just for privacy controls, but for Notifications too. Anything that intrudes on our minds is fair game. Anything that makes us feel surveilled and unsafe online. And yep, our team has to update the extension each time platforms update their settings! But to us, it’s worth it. Our digital lives are just that important.
Make no mistake… We aren’t tech pessimists or skeptics. We’re realists who have seen everything our platforms can be, and where they may overreach. I’ve worked at Pinterest, Quora, Google, and Facebook. And I’ve leveraged all these platforms to raise awareness for important causes, from establishing a framework for disclosing diversity numbers on Medium, to using Github to collect data on women in engineering, or using Twitter to spread the word about Project Include and my non-profit #MovingForward.
These platforms are some of our most important inventions, but they are not perfect. Will we wait for the oversight boards to save us, or try to save ourselves?
I used to be more open about my life. So did my friends. And honestly… it felt great a lot of the time. Attention, likes, love, and support for the things I care about. And of course, lots of spur-of-the-moment meetings that moved my career forward!
But it all came at a darker cost. I was targeted by stalkers interested in me, or in sabotaging the causes I stood for. My friends were targeted too, for their relationships with partners of other races… or just for being themselves online.
As humans we do yearn to share, but in a way that’s safe. We can’t silence our voices because of a handful of bad actors. And we can’t give in to privacy policies driven by incentivizing more scrolling, more views, and more money for our platforms.
We hope you’ll join us on this journey to make our new digital world — one where we spend more and more time — a lot safer. Safer by default. And it doesn’t have to feel like your company’s dreaded Privacy Training… These are the pillars of a new world we’re crafting together!
It can feel… like a Party.
- Tracy Chou
Tracy Chou, Founder & CEO (@triketora)
Block Party is proud to be backed by a diverse group of investors who bring important perspective and expertise to the problem we are solving.
Our pre-seed round was led by Charles Hudson of Precursor Ventures, and other notable investors include Alexia Bonatsos of Dream Machine, former journalist and co-editor in chief of TechCrunch; Ellen Pao, co-founder and CEO of Project Include, and former interim CEO at Reddit where she fought hard to clean up harassment on the site; and Alex Stamos, director of the Stanford Internet Observatory and former Chief Security Officer at Facebook.
