Block Party offers tool for optimizing social media privacy

[ResidentialBusiness]

If optimizing your social media privacy settings feels important but overwhelming, a company called Block Party may be able to help. 

Founder and CEO Tracy Chou has long been known for advocating for diversity in the tech industry. And like many diversity advocates, and women and people of color in technology, she’s experienced plenty of harassment online, along with outright stalking. She founded Block Party after realizing that tech platforms themselves didn’t make it particularly easy to optimize settings for privacy and security.

The initial Block Party product focused on the platform then called Twitter, helping users easily filter out spam, harassment, and other unwanted content, while easily blocking other users based on their on-site behavior.

[Image: Block Party]

“It completely changed my experience on Twitter,” Chou says. “I felt like I could just use the platform and not feel like there might be an unpleasant surprise every time I checked my mentions.”

But while Block Party is still highlighted as a “success story” on X’s developer site, Chou says her company was forced to put that version of the product on hold after the social network imposed new API restrictions after Elon Musk took ownership. The company then pivoted to a new approach, developing a browser extension compatible with Chrome, Firefox, and Edge that lets users automatically update their account settings across 11 platforms, including X, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Snapchat, Venmo, and Strava.

[Image: Block Party]

Similar to virus scanning software, Block Party can automatically go through settings on the various platforms, presenting users with a checklist of potential risk factors and offering the opportunity to change them. That could mean activating two-factor authentication on particular platforms, removing location information from LinkedIn profiles, or making Venmo transactions and Strava run maps more private.   

“As a user, you don’t have to go dig through a million menus and find the right setting to go change,” Chou says.

The tool can also help users scrub their social profiles of old material and connections that can impact privacy, including untagging photos, deleting old posts, and bulk unfriending long-forgotten acquaintances on Facebook. Chou says in the current political climate she’s seen interest from current and former federal employees concerned about doxxing, as well as people who plan to make political statements and want to reduce the risk their family members will be found through their social media and targeted for harassment.

But, she says, Block Party is designed to be useful to people with a wide variety of threat models and concerns, letting them reap the benefits of using big online platforms while mitigating some of the privacy risks. Chou and her colleagues regularly look at guides to social media privacy, including those published in the popular press and those targeting people with particular needs, like members of the military, to ensure they’re automations can help people with common issues.

“We also are scanning through all the settings ourselves, just to stay on top of all the changes and anything happening,” she says.

Since the Block Party browser extension essentially automates navigating and clicking through configuration settings, it can develop issues as platforms adjust their own menus. But, Chou says, the company can usually quickly fix any bugs as they pop up—sometimes within a single day—and the tool is designed to be robust enough to gracefully work around malfunctions.

[Image: Block Party]

Using a browser extension also means Block Party doesn’t require API support from any of the platforms and that it doesn’t need to store user credentials like passwords, since it relies on users logging in as they ordinarily would through their browsers. The service doesn’t store user data unnecessarily and doesn’t access accounts without permission, Chou says.

For individual users, Block Party subscriptions start at $25 per year after a seven-day free trial. But the company has also begun offering enterprise plans that include integration with single sign-on platforms and reporting on use within an organization, as employers try to keep workers protected from harassment and potential phishing attacks and internet users in general become increasingly cognizant of security concerns involving social media.

“It’s not just the data that’s getting trafficked from marketing brokers,” Chou says. “It’s also just the stuff that we’re putting online ourselves.”

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