Episode 244: Inside Tracy Chou's Block Party for Social Media

Summary

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Episode Summary: "Inside Tracy Chou’s Block Party for Social Media"

Podcast: What the Hack?
Host: Beau Friedlender (DeleteMe)
Guest: Tracy Chou
Episode: 244
Date: March 24, 2026

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Overview

In this episode, host Beau Friedlender interviews engineer and diversity advocate Tracy Chou, exploring her journey through Silicon Valley, her activism for data transparency and inclusion, her personal experiences with online harassment, and her creation of the privacy tool Block Party. The discussion also reveals Block Party’s recent acquisition by DeleteMe, aiming to offer broader protection for online users. The episode serves as a candid look at the personal and systemic risks embedded in modern social platforms, while providing practical advice and hope for building safer digital experiences.

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Key Points and Timeline

1. Tracy Chou’s Background in Tech

[03:36–06:10]

• Tracy is a Silicon Valley native who went to Stanford for undergrad and graduate studies.
• She did not plan to pursue computer science but followed friends into the field and found her calling.
• Early experiences at Facebook, Quora, and Pinterest shaped her understanding of tech’s outsized impact:

  “It was kind of mind-blowing to me… we were responsible for making this thing exist that wouldn’t have existed otherwise.” — Tracy Chou [05:25]

• Her mother was also a rare female software engineer in the ‘80s, inspiring Tracy’s sense of representation:

  "In her class at National Taiwan University, there were eight women out of 200." — Tracy Chou [07:11]

2. Gender and Diversity in Engineering

[07:30–10:09]

• Tracy recounts being the only woman in product meetings, asked to represent all women's needs:

  "What do women want?... I don’t feel equipped to answer on behalf of slightly more than half of the global population." — Tracy Chou [08:00]

• Realized that engineers’ identities and biases directly shape platforms.
• First built the block button on Quora to self-protect from harassment, underscoring how lived experiences drive innovation:

  “If I hadn’t been there… we wouldn’t have built the block button so early.” — Tracy Chou [08:45]

3. Online Harassment and the Need for Controls

[10:14–13:36]

• Social media engagement is frequently measured by “clicks” or “comments,” with little regard for whether interactions are positive or harmful:

  “In the short term, engagement may be higher even if… it’s harassment… not all engagement is good.” — Tracy Chou [10:36]

• Tracy endured persistent, targeted abuse on various platforms for her advocacy, equating advice to simply “quit” social spaces to telling street harassment victims to “never go out anymore”:

  “It felt analogous to telling somebody... maybe you could just stay home all day and never go out.” — Tracy Chou [13:10]

4. Diversity Advocacy and Community Response

[13:52–19:47]

• Tracy’s blog post on the absence of diversity data in tech went viral; she became an “accidental activist."
• She highlighted the tech world’s lack of self-measurement on diversity and inclusion, sparking widespread dialogue.
• Faced intense hostility and condescension, often having her technical contributions doubted or dismissed because of gender:

  "I remember at some point thinking, I probably spend at least 30% of my brain power per day frustrated about being a woman... imagine if I could spend 100%… instead of wasting all this time worrying about… the racism that’s going on." — Tracy Chou [18:50]

5. Stalking, Doxxing, and OPSEC Awareness

[20:19–28:46]

• Recounted experiences with stalking, both online and in-person, resulting from increased visibility as an activist.
• Described realizing how features like public Strava profiles and geotagged posts can "doxx" users by revealing routines and locations:

  “If I’m running from home, tracking my run... I’m basically doxxing myself.” — Tracy Chou [13:13] / [26:01] “I had posted a photo from a museum... and then [the stalker] showed up there at the same time.” — Tracy Chou [26:21]

• The normalization of sharing personal details online, before risks were widely understood, accumulates digital footprints leveraged by abusive actors.

6. Social Media as a Modern Attack Vector

[28:33–31:46]

• Scammers increasingly extract social connections and personal data to craft highly effective phishing, deepfake, and social engineering attacks.
• Modern privacy controls are complex and time-consuming:

  “20 minutes is a very severe underestimate… for a normal human being to do it, forget it.” — Tracy Chou [31:46]

7. Building Block Party: A Human-Centric Privacy Tool

[32:15–34:02]

• Tracy describes founding Block Party as a way to make amends for helping create unsafe platforms, aiming to empower users to be online safely:

  “Block Party was my attempt to make amends for having helped build some of these platforms. ...making it so the good doesn't come with a bunch of bad.” — Tracy Chou [32:15]

• Block Party helps users systematically identify and fix risky settings across multiple social platforms:

  "You can actually exert agency. You can go systematically and try to reduce your risk." — Tracy Chou [33:38]

8. How Block Party Works

[37:00–39:15]

• Block Party is a browser extension that scans platforms—including social media and services like Google or Venmo—for insecure settings and offers user-friendly fixes.
• Recognizes nuanced needs for personal vs. professional privacy across different platforms.
• Offers recommendations and one-click changes to shift defaults towards safer choices.

9. Block Party’s Impact and Acquisition by DeleteMe

[41:03–47:49]

• Enterprise customers increasingly recognize social media as a vulnerability for staff, blending personal and professional risk.
• Block Party automates security processes that otherwise require laborious, manual workshops.
• Postings on platforms like LinkedIn have led directly to sophisticated scams within Block Party’s own team:

  “She thought it was me telling her to go buy gift cards… all that information came literally from things you’d done publicly.” — Tracy Chou [43:52]

• Block Party’s merger with DeleteMe was announced, combining social privacy and data removal:

  “DeleteMe has acquired Block Party…. We will be able to protect that many more people at so much more scale.” — Tracy Chou [47:06]

10. Notable Quotes

• “We were making something exist that would not exist but for the efforts of the people in this room.” — Tracy Chou [06:10]
• “Having a following made me a target; the more visible you are, the higher the risk.” — Tracy Chou [20:32]
• “The platform companies all want you to share as much as possible because it’s more interesting and profitable for them.” — Tracy Chou [36:04]
• “It is showing the world we have agency… We don’t have to just be victims of what greater powers have decided we should experience.” — Tracy Chou [45:27]

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Timestamps of Important Moments

• 03:36 — Tracy’s roots in the Bay Area and tech
• 07:30 — Diversity lessons at Quora; creating the block button
• 10:14 — The problem with social engagement metrics
• 13:10 — Analogies between online and street harassment
• 18:50 — Emotional costs of bias in engineering
• 26:01 — Personal stories of being stalked due to online exposure
• 31:46 — The practical difficulty of managing social privacy settings
• 32:15 — Motivation and founding of Block Party
• 37:00 — How Block Party browser extension works
• 43:52 — Real-life phishing example within Block Party
• 47:06 — Announcement of the DeleteMe-Block Party merger

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Tone and Memorable Moments

• The tone is conversational, honest, and often wry, with Beau and Tracy both candid about the flaws of tech culture and the realities of harassment.
• Tracy’s humor about representing “all women” [08:00] and Beau’s jokes about “block buttons for walking down the street” [09:38] balance the weight of the topics.
• The announcement of Block Party’s acquisition by DeleteMe closes the episode on a hopeful, forward-looking note for online privacy advocacy.

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Actionable Advice (Tinfoil Swan)

[48:14–49:56]

• Review your privacy settings on all social media accounts, even if you’re not active on them.
• Check what data you’re sharing—location, relationships, etc.—and restrict as much as you’re comfortable with.
• Block Party (now part of DeleteMe) will soon make these changes easier and more accessible for users.

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Closing

A compelling, illustrative conversation that highlights both the human vulnerabilities and technical gaps in today’s social internet, while mapping out real steps to take control and stay safer online. Tracy Chou's journey from “accidental activist” to privacy entrepreneur, now as part of DeleteMe, underscores both the stakes and the promise for online agency and security.

---

Transcript

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[Beau Friedlender]

Al Gore never said he invented the Internet. Not the Internet you're thinking about.

[Tracy Chow]

You're really into computers, huh? Yeah. What are you doing?

[Beau Friedlender]

Dialing into the school's computer. War Games came out in 1983, the year TCP IP protocols were standardized. That's why Lightman could hack into the school records and change his grade for an F to a C. The Internet was pretty boring for the first 20 or 30 years. Then came social media.

[Tracy Chow]

People want to go on the Internet and check out their friends, so why not build a website that offers that friends, pictures, profiles.

[Beau Friedlender]

I'm talking about taking the entire social

[Tracy Chow]

experience of college and putting it online.

[Beau Friedlender]

That's from the trailer for the social network. Found it on YouTube, a social media platform. It's been viewed more than 17 million times. If you scroll through the comments, you might find some new like minded friends. That's social media, and it made the Internet sticky.

[Interviewer or Legal Deposition Participant]

You may have heard there are multiple legal cases underway alleging social media platforms like Instagram, YouTube, TikTok and Snap are designed to be addictive and can be harmful to minors. So.

[Beau Friedlender]

But social media can also be really dangerous.

[Tracy Chow]

Strava profiles are public by default. And so if I'm running from home, tracking my run, like when I leave and come back, I'm basically doxxing myself. You can literally see where I live.

[Beau Friedlender]

Turns out some people are watching very carefully.

[Tracy Chow]

He had flown to San Francisco and when I posted this, he then realized, like, he could show up where I was. Like, he wasn't that far away.

[Beau Friedlender]

Today we're talking to Tracy Chow, a prominent advocate for diversity data, an early employee at Facebook, Quora and Pinterest, and who was one of Time magazine's Women of the Year for building a tool to fight UN online abuse and harassment. I'm Beau Friedlender and this is what the Hack, the podcast that asks in a world where your data is everywhere, how do you stay safe online? Tracy Chow, champion of data diversity, mind behind the Internet safety tool Block Party. Welcome to what the Heck.

[Tracy Chow]

Thank you. I'm excited to be here.

[Beau Friedlender]

I'm super excited to have you here. Now, I'll just say there's a reason this conversation is happening right now that I think is going to be meaningful to a lot of people. But we're going to get to that at the end of this episode. First, I want to know a little bit about you. Where are you right now?

[Tracy Chow]

I'm in San Francisco. I actually grew up in the Bay Area as well, so I'm like a very Bay Area, Silicon Valley native sort of person. Yeah.

[Beau Friedlender]

So you went to school in the Bay Area?

[Tracy Chow]

Yes, the, you know, junior college down in Palo Alto.

[Beau Friedlender]

Yeah, that's. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Go trees. So you went to Stanford. I think you went there for undergraduate and graduate.

[Tracy Chow]

Yep, that's correct. Yes.

[Beau Friedlender]

I only know that because we're friends on LinkedIn and I'll leave it at that. So. So you are Bay Area through and through, which means that startups in the tech sector are kind of just the air you breathe.

[Tracy Chow]

That's about right.

[Beau Friedlender]

Have you been in tech your entire career?

[Tracy Chow]

What's sort of funny about this is when I started college, I did not think I wanted to do computer science or engineering per se, and I just kind of got sucked in, probably because I didn't have a better plan and partly because my freshman year dorm mates were taking electrical engineering classes, and my prime criteria for taking a class was having friends in the class. So I ended up taking electrical engineering classes with my dorm mates, which led me down the path towards computer science because I discovered that I hated electrical engineering. But computer science was close and I could kind of take advantage of what I'd been studying to do computer science. So I have now been in the tech industry for quite some time now, but it almost felt like it was against all of my instincts that I ended up here. I actually have a very core memory in my software developer existence from early on when I interned at Facebook, back when it was still a startup. There were probably a hundred or so of us on the engineering team and supporting 100 million active users, like monthly active users. And I remember people Commenting like, wow, like, per engineer, we're supporting a million people. And it's just like the people in this building, like on this floor, who are doing this. Like, we're creating this product and supporting this many people, connecting online and doing fun stuff. It was kind of mind blowing to me that, you know, sitting at our computers, just typing away in this, like, one room, the people, like, I don't know how many of us, like, within these walls, we were responsible for making this thing exist that wouldn't have existed otherwise.

[Beau Friedlender]

I'm like, whatever the opposite of numerate is. But you, you were responsible for like a million users, is that right?

[Tracy Chow]

Well, it's more like you divide it out sort of like across all the. But yeah, yeah.

[Beau Friedlender]

Mind boggling.

[Tracy Chow]

Yeah. That still, like, you know, 100 people in engineering at Facebook at the time that I was there was still quite large compared to then later experiences I had. So I worked at Quora and Pinterest quite early on, those teams where I was a second engineer hired at Quora, the question and answer site. And then I joined Pinterest when It was about 10 people, like five of us on engineering. And those experiences even more so cemented for me this, like, wow, we are making something exist that would not exist but for the efforts of the people in this room. Like, it's kind of amazing that I'm sitting at my computer typing away and I'm creating something. And as some additional context, I'll add that my mom is also a software engineer and she has a PhD in computer science.

[Beau Friedlender]

She was an engineer in the 80s.

[Tracy Chow]

Yeah, that's right.

[Beau Friedlender]

That's. That was really unusual back in the day.

[Tracy Chow]

Yeah. I grew up hearing all of her stories of being a woman in engineering. In her class at National Taiwan university, there were eight women out of 200.

[Beau Friedlender]

Okay, so 4%.

[Tracy Chow]

Yep. Hey, you're pretty numerate.

[Beau Friedlender]

Yeah, I just realized I might be. Quora accounts as social media.

[Tracy Chow]

Yeah, we thought of ourselves in that category. Yeah. Like, everybody has their own user account. You set your profile photo and like write stuff under your name and build your own credibility. Yeah. Another core memory I have from early in my software engineering days is sitting around a table with a few of my colleagues who are all male, talking about some product decisions we want to make about how we're building feed for Quora. And somebody turned to me and asked Tracy, what do women want?

[Beau Friedlender]

Oh, goodness.

[Tracy Chow]

I was maybe 22 years old at that time and thinking, I don't feel equipped to answer on behalf of half slightly more Than half of the global population.

[Beau Friedlender]

Yeah.

[Tracy Chow]

But I guess I should try because I am the closest to being able to represent.

[Beau Friedlender]

That's such a bizarre point of view. What do women want? I don't know. What do men want? Well, okay, so I don't even feel the need to explain what's wrong with the position. That put you in short version a lot.

[Tracy Chow]

Yeah. And it seems kind of obvious now to think about it, like, the people who are building these products obviously are going to influence what products are built and how they're built. But it took that question to really make it sink in for me that all of us were encoding our biases and perspectives into what we were building. We were making the decisions of what would be in these platforms and how people would interact and what sorts of behaviors we would encourage and what guardrails we might put in for things going wrong. One of the things that was nice at Quora was I got to build the block button pretty early because somebody was harassing me and I was like, hey, guess what? I can make this stop by building the block functionality. And my teammates were like, sure, if you want to build it, go ahead and build it. So I felt very empowering to be able to step in there and say, I'm going to make this happen, like, some safety and protections for myself. But I also think if I hadn't been there on the receiving end of harassment from somebody on a platform that I was building. Yeah, if I hadn't been there, we wouldn't have built the block button so early. I think this is true of many other platforms, like the.

[Beau Friedlender]

Oh, because a guy would have been like, bring it, bro.

[Tracy Chow]

Yeah. Or he just wouldn't have been targeted in the first place.

[Beau Friedlender]

So you built a block button. I have friends who probably wish they had a block button just walking down the street. I know I do.

[Tracy Chow]

Yeah. Yeah. It was actually really fun as one of my earliest projects when I worked at Quora. So I got to think about, what are all the surface areas in which I want to be protected. It's like, ah, he shouldn't be able to comment on my answers, shouldn't be able to send me a message, shouldn't be able to do anything on any of my content that would generate notifications. It's actually a very fun exercise to think about, like, how am I going to protect myself? And then I'm going to make it happen now.

[Beau Friedlender]

Block buttons existed.

[Tracy Chow]

Oh, yeah, Yeah. I mean, the concept of blocking people existed, and it was on other platforms.

[Beau Friedlender]

That begs the question, you know, we want as much engagement as possible, but we, we need to define possible because some types of engagement are upsetting, harmful, they negatively impact quality of life, like productivity, a sense of well being, all that. Where do we draw the line on what is acceptable behavior, what is okay online?

[Tracy Chow]

First, I would say just to talk about what engagement looks like from the perspective of engineers and product people building these platforms is. It's often just a bunch of numbers and not qualitative. So we are looking at things like how many clicks are happening, how many comments are happening, how many friends follows are created. So there's not a very good sense of the quality of these interactions and engagements at the surface level. And like the KPIs, the key performance indicators that companies are trying to drive up, they're often not looking at these things. And in the short term, engagement may be higher. Even if the nature of the engagement is not good, like it's harassment or you know, fighting back and forth or whatever it is, it might generate a lot of activity that to somebody who's not looking at the quality of it may think, oh, this is good, like there's more stuff happening. But to your point, not all of this engagement is good. And maybe over time it's actually bad because for example, if you're getting a lot of harassment, so maybe it looks like a lot of engagement from the platform level of like, oh, you're getting tons of replies to all of your posts, like, maybe that's, that seems like a good thing. But if it's actually all abuse and harassment being directed your way, at some point you may just step aside and not want to deal with it anymore. And that was an experience that I had particularly on Twitter where I was very active doing sort of like advocacy, activism work. I got a lot of unpleasant things sent my way, whether through mentions or dms. And sometimes it would spill over to other platforms. So I very personally experienced, not all engagement is good engagement. And it ranged from more like garden variety sexism and racism and sort of like childish insults to pretty sustained, targeted, coordinated attacks. It feels pretty bad. So I went through a period of trying to grapple with all these like very negative emotions for myself and like trying to understand the emotional impact it was having on me. It felt, I mean, it feels terrible to have people yelling negative things at you all day long. And I also have people who would tell me, like, maybe you should just not be online anymore, like, why don't you just delete your account? Like that would solve the problem when. Which offended me because it Felt very unfair that I should not be able to participate online in spaces that can be very useful and interesting and positive in my life because there's like a few assholes out here who are harassing me. It felt analogous to telling somebody who's getting street harassment, like, maybe you could just stay home all day long and never go out anymore.

[Beau Friedlender]

Or never go out in public.

[Tracy Chow]

Right? Like this just. It felt like the complete wrong response. And I'd also dealt with, like, the more severe stalking questions of, like, people from the Internet who would say they were going to come find me. Unclear if they were truly going to or not. But then I also did deal with some cases where people showed up. I flew around the world and showed up where I was.

[Beau Friedlender]

So, Tracy, what was making these, I assume, dudes so angry? What were you. What was, what was the work you were doing that was triggering, Triggering. I love that. I love that the trolls were triggered. It's so funny. But so what was going on? What were you doing?

[Tracy Chow]

So I was speaking about issues of diversity and inclusion in tech. To that point. We were discussing earlier of how we should have more representative populations involved in building technology because it would be better. I wrote a post that ended up going viral about the hypocrisy of the tech industry not having any data on diversity. So as a very data driven industry, we measure everything. We a, B test everything, anything we roll out. We have to understand what the success metrics are. Are we hitting those? We try to learn from the data. But with regards to diversity, there was no data up until 2013. I wrote this blog post, wasn't necessarily expecting anything to come of it, but after I put this out there, I think it hit a nerve and a lot of people are like, yeah, you're right. Like, why is there no data on diversity and what our demographics look like? If we think we want to improve this, why aren't we measuring the baseline and then setting targets against it? So I became an accidental activist around this topic and my side hustle, I guess you would say, alongside being an engineer at these various tech companies, was then talking about diversity in tech. So I built more of a platform on this topic, trying to get more of this message out there that we should be building more inclusive workplaces, trying to build more pathways for different populations to enter the tech industry. And then it would benefit all of us, people who are in the industry and also everybody that we hope to serve with technology.

[Beau Friedlender]

Just this week, 404 Media released video interviews of testimony given by the Doge Bros who were charged with taking away funding for dei. I don't know if you saw them or not, but they, but, but they're really. Responses were absurd.

[Interviewer or Legal Deposition Participant]

How do you interpret dei? There was the EO explicitly laid out the details? I don't remember it off the top of my head. It's okay. I'm asking for your understanding of it. Yeah, my understanding was exactly what was written in the eo. Okay, so can you. I don't remember what was in the eo. So right now do you have an understanding of what D.E.I.

[Tracy Chow]

is?

[Interviewer or Legal Deposition Participant]

Yeah. Okay, so what's your understanding as you sit here today in this deposition? Well, it was exactly what was written in the eo. And so anytime that we would.

[Beau Friedlender]

Did you get a lot of hostility from tech bros? I mean, was that a thing?

[Tracy Chow]

Yeah. So my DEI activism, although I'd say at that time it was not even called DEI yet, but my activism came from personal experience.

[Beau Friedlender]

Okay.

[Tracy Chow]

I didn't realize that I was treated differently for being a woman at first. Maybe I was just sort of not very self aware or not aware of

[Beau Friedlender]

my surroundings or focused on your work.

[Tracy Chow]

Yeah. It took me a while to realize that the feelings of not belonging, feeling that I couldn't hack it in the tech industry, might have more to do with the social factors than my own abilities. I realized I actually do like coding quite a bit and software engineering and I'm pretty good at it, I think. So these feelings that I might not be able to make it in the industry did not have to do with my ability to do the job. It had to do with the social environment I was in. Constantly being cut down or told that I didn't understand what was going on. People being dismissed, cut out of a.

[Beau Friedlender]

Like the technical side of things.

[Tracy Chow]

Yes, yes. Yeah.

[Beau Friedlender]

And was it accurate?

[Tracy Chow]

No. There are cases where I would identify a bug that was actually quite severe and try to tell people, like, hey, we need to fix this bug. It's corrupting memory. And people would at first say, like, that's not possible, that there was that bug, because that's a bad bug. Like, if that actually existed, we'd have a lot of problems. And then a little bit later, somebody, a man looking at him being like, oh, actually there is a bug here. And then people being like, wow, this is a very severe problem, like, we must address it. I was like, yes, that's what I was trying to tell you. Like, none of you would listen. And then the response being like, well, who's going to fix this bug? Like, who's going to I was like, well, I mean, I volunteered to fix it since I was the one who had found it in the first place. Like, I know exactly what the condition is that would trigger it. I know how to fix it. And the response would be like, well, are you sure you know how to do it? We need to make sure we get lots of other reviewers to confirm that you've done the right thing. Like, we're not sure that you know how to fix this. I was like, look, I found it in the first place. I know exactly what to do. Sure, you can check my work. It's going to be correct. And like, you probably should generally check people's work. But it feels like it's, you know, disproportionately focused on me as a woman, that you don't think I'm going to do a good job. So very, very common stories. I'm not saying this is unique to me. In fact, like, it's a very common experience for women and minorities in the workplace. So that sort of frustration was sort of pervasive in my everyday. I remember at some point thinking, I probably spend at least 30% of my brain power per day frustrated about being a woman and how I'm treated differently. And I still do a pretty good job with the remaining 70% to do all the technical tasks I'm supposed to do. But can you imagine if I could spend 100% of my energy just kicking ass on the technical side instead of having to waste all this time worrying about the sexism or the racism that's going on?

[Beau Friedlender]

As a person who is, you know, conversant with math, I guess you figured out that you needed to do something about it. Now the response was fast and furious online. People did not like what you had to say about your experience. Did you? Did you put it as, this is my experience and this has to change, or.

[Tracy Chow]

Yeah, there's a whole bunch I put out. There's some of it. It was like, here's my personal experience. I do speak for a general class of people who feel this way. I'm not going to say that everybody's had the same experience as me, but there are many others who also have felt dismissed or condescended to or feel like they don't have the same opportunities. But if we really want to build for everybody, we need much better inclusion and representation in the teams that are building. It can't be perfect, but we can do a lot better than having 100% white male teams.

[Beau Friedlender]

So you were being harassed, but. But you were also being Stalked by somebody. And that happened because you were advocating for diversity online, because of your opinion, because of what you had said online. What happened?

[Tracy Chow]

It's a little unclear to me what's going through the minds of these people who form these sometimes parasocial attachments or sometimes, like, very antagonistic. It's sort of. It's an attachment, but in this weird way. Like, they're very angry about what you're saying, but then also, like, why? To make a connection with you. It runs the gamut. I think what was happening for me was just having additional exposure online. Like having a little bit more of a platform meant that there were more people on the Internet who were seeing me and seeing my profile, and for whatever reason, whatever weird thing was happening in their brain, it caused them to want to do things to me. So I can't characterize all of the stalking and the harassment in the same way, but a common theme I've heard from friends who are quite online, other folks who are quite online, is I get any threshold of fame. Like, more people get exposed to who you are, the higher the chances of somebody being a little crazy and who knows why they do what they want to do. But the more you're out there, the more likely that one of these weirdos ends up being obsessed with you and wants to do something to you. But the threshold for women is much lower for men, where they end up having to deal with these problems. So a man who has a million followers is almost certainly dealing with some of these like weirdos as well. But a woman with only a thousand followers might be dealing with similar.

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[Beau Friedlender]

You're somebody that's visible. You were timewoman of the year, there's only 12 of them. And you have over 100,000 followers on, on X. And to a subset of society, you are somebody who is intolerably visible.

[Tracy Chow]

Yes.

[Beau Friedlender]

Because we live in a society that, that doesn't tolerate certain kinds of success. Talk about that and, and, and, and, and how it played a role in what happened.

[Tracy Chow]

There are people who are mad that I'm a good software engineer and I'm a woman. I think I triggered a lot of insecurities for people and even if they can't identify in themselves that that's what's upsetting them, I've seen that phenomena enough times. I'm pretty sure that's what's happening. And the lashing out happens in different ways. Sometimes it's very direct and other times it's in these weird undercutting ways or sending harassment or all the weird things that you've seen online, I've experienced, probably.

[Beau Friedlender]

So you've been stalked physically, like someone has gone online to see where you live and figured that out and bothered you?

[Tracy Chow]

Yes. I think I still came at being online with this naivete of it's all, this all good stuff. Like, it's all good. I don't mind being like, who's gonna do anything to me? And it felt rewarding to build a following, to put stuff out there and have people react to it. So I had not thought too hard about my physical safety because I didn't think that there were threats. And I dealt with some of these weirdos messaging me saying that they were going to show up where I was. I figured, like, it's not real. People can say whatever they want. And there were a couple of cases that probably were just like harmless people making threats online. So I ignored those as well until I realized actually that like, one of these people was actually stalking me and showed up multiple times where I was in person. Did you know, I didn't realize at the time. And then I saw later, like he was posting photos from exactly where I was at the times that I was there. Yeah, that freaked me out. I realized like, oh, I need to actually be a lot more locked down than I am and think a lot harder about all of my opsec.

[Beau Friedlender]

So, okay, OPSEC Operational security.

[Tracy Chow]

So then I had to think through, okay, what are all the things I need to lock down? Like, where is my information out there? My addresses? Fortunately, because I've moved a Lot or, like, less of a problem. I mean, you could probably still find out my address online, but because I'd moved a lot, a lot of, like, old addresses. So it's like, okay, at least I have.

[Beau Friedlender]

It'd be a lot of work, deflection.

[Tracy Chow]

But other things I wish I was like. I think one time when my stalker showed up where I was is because I had posted a photo from a museum that I was at, basically in real time. And then he showed up there at the same time. Yeah, he showed up like maybe like half an hour later. I was like, well, that was dumb of me. I mean, I didn't realize that that was a threat. He lived in a different country, but I guess he had flown to San Francisco. And when I posted this, he then realized, like, he could show up where I was. Like, he wasn't that far away. So I realized, like, okay, this now very common advice to hear common wisdom, like, don't post photos in real time. Like, wait until after you've left to post a photo. It's like, okay, yes, I need to do that now. But also just thinking through other attack vectors, like, I didn't want to share publicly who my close friends and family are, because if I'm linked to people who maybe share a lot online, then I can be exposed through them as well. So it's not that I don't like my friends and family and, like, don't want to share them publicly, but I just, for like, safety reasons, don't want to have those relationships be very public. It compromises my security and also their security potentially. I like to use Strava to track my runs outside. Somebody followed me once and I realized, like, Strava profiles are public by default. And so if I'm running from home, tracking my run, like when I leave and come back, I'm basically doxxing myself. You can literally see where I live and you see my routines and almost in real time, you can know where I'm running, which is really, really dumb. So locking that down was important. So I had to go through. Just think about all the places where my data might be out there. On the data broker side, obviously those folks are buying and selling that data. But also, like, on all my own social media and like, the accounts that I'm using, even things like reviews I've written, whether it's like Google Reviews or

[Beau Friedlender]

Yelp, Strava is a great example. And you said it exactly right. You basically doxxed yourself. But social media, what you described was a systematic doxxing of self by design,

[Interviewer or Legal Deposition Participant]

these secretive locations are supposed to be difficult to spot. But a heat map posted online by Strava, a company that tracks people's exercise routes, has inadvertently put these places on public display for all the world to see.

[Tracy Chow]

Yeah, a lot of us got online early enough when there weren't so many of these concerns back then, and we're just encouraged to share by the platforms. And it felt good then. It didn't seem like there were downsides to being more open and connected. Like, add all these people to be your friends on Facebook, post photos from where you're going, the parks you go to, the coffee shops you go to. Just share broadly, build a following, lots of connections. Like, we didn't really think about the potential dangers, and now a lot of us have these extensive digital footprints that bad actors are getting very good at using against us. So I've dealt with some threats that are more unique to what my situation is. But now a lot of fraudsters will pull the information up, and not necessarily because they're trying to target you in particular, but just targeting a lot of people to try to scam you of your money, defraud you of your money with information that we put out there on social media. Not too hard to figure out often, like who's close to you. There's enough of our likenesses out there, like image and video, that it's not so hard to create deep fake attacks, like the voice cloning scams, where somebody calls you, sounds like somebody that's very close to you, and they're in distress and they need your help urgently. Like when you hear those sorts of situations and it really sounds like them, because these voice clones are really effective now, then you fall for it. And so it's not just people who are highly visible who are dealing with this. I think it's increasing. All of us, as scammers and fraudsters are getting more sophisticated. AI technology is making it easier and easier to personalize attacks with information that you may have put online.

[Beau Friedlender]

I mean, this is a dopamine El Dorado, but a gold mine for data, too, and one that puts us all at risk. So I posted this stuff back in 2008. Whatever it was, doesn't matter. I didn't look at the privacy policy, and I didn't really think about how it would impact me. Simple fact, if something is free, you're the product. With social media, that means data that can be used to sell you stuff, make you more findable, make it easier for a threat actor to target you. I Used to answer the phone at True story and not say yes or hello because I was afraid that someone was going to get my voice prompt and use it against me. And I make a podcast so you can kind of judge my intelligence based on that. But anyway, this is a data owned goal, like footy style. We filled the swamp that the tech bros built made possible by making what we shared permanent, packageable and profitable. So you built something to remedy the situation, which is super cool because it takes 20 minutes at least per platform to go through the privacy settings and location sharing and everything else to create a situation where it's not that easy to get hacked or targeted, whatever. When I say 20 minutes, multiply that by quite a bit because policies change all the time. And with that your exposure every single time.

[Tracy Chow]

I would say 20 minutes is a very severe underestimate like having now for me for.

[Beau Friedlender]

For real.

[Tracy Chow]

Okay. Okay.

[Beau Friedlender]

Yeah. I mean I know all the. And I regular, every week I do an advice piece at the end of this show. So I know where all the stuff is because I, for a living, I do, I keep things private. But for a normal human being to do it, forget it. I don't think they're going to get it right. Unless it's kind of what you do. You're not going to get it right. So you created Block Party. What is it?

[Tracy Chow]

Block Party was my attempt to make amends for having helped build some of these platforms. So I started Block Party with the mission of making the Internet safe again and making it so that people can be online and partake in all the goodness of being online. So still seeing the optimistic view of what platforms can be used for, like democratization of information, of access, connection. There are a lot of really good things that can come of being online, but making it so that all the good doesn't come with a bunch of bad.

[Beau Friedlender]

The bad being stalking and doxing and.

[Tracy Chow]

And harassment and loss of your data, loss of control of who you are

[Beau Friedlender]

online, account takeover even.

[Tracy Chow]

Yes, absolutely. And it was a way for me to exert agency as well in the situation. One of the pieces of advice I got when I was dealing with the worst of the stalking, when I had to go actually seek out some guidance from private security firms to figure out what I should do, was the worst thing that can happen for people who are the subjects of online harassment or abuse is a feeling of helplessness where you feel like you can't do anything, somebody has just turned their attention to you, and now you are kind of screwed. And that mindset is Potentially the worst thing, because you just then kind of like sink into this morass of bad feeling and feel like you can't do anything, but you can actually exert agency. You can think about what are the potential attack vectors, what are the potential compromise vectors, and you can go systematically go through and try to reduce your risk in all these ways.

[Beau Friedlender]

You can't though, if you don't know what those are. So that's kind of where you come in.

[Tracy Chow]

Yes, yes. I mean, if you're very dedicated, you could go to old effort to learn all these things. I, I took this advice of you have agency, you can exert agency to an extreme. And so instead of just securing my own accounts and locking things down for myself, I decided I want to build solutions to help everybody do this. People who don't necessarily want to wade through all of these settings themselves and wade through all of the harassment and terrible things themselves. Coming from a background of engineering and having worked on platforms, I knew that it was possible to do much better. But potentially the incentives were not there for the platform companies to build these better tools for you. So I decided to go out and build these tools myself and hopefully help not just myself, but many other people who might be dealing with the ills of being online.

[Beau Friedlender]

If you have a phone or a computer, you've gotten a patch, a security update. You need to keep your device safe. Everybody knows that patch. The reason those exist is because the Internet and everything that connects to it was built built without privacy or security by design. Memory errors, zero day vulnerabilities, bad stuff that happens, putting profits in front of people's safety, all kinds of things. This is why people like Tracy need to exist. If you're, if you're not sure what we're talking about, Tracy is the patch. She looked at the privacy by design flaw and it is by design that things aren't private. Instead, I'm going to reverse engineer it, build a bolt on fix, just like a patch, but for humans. And what gets me is you created something that can go in and just say, strava, don't share that with people who don't know me. And Google, you can share this for work, but not that. Is that right?

[Tracy Chow]

That's right. That's right.

[Beau Friedlender]

Very cool.

[Tracy Chow]

Yeah. The platform companies all want you to share as much as possible because it's more interesting when you go onto a platform and see lots of data there. I find it a little ridiculous. Ridiculous that Venmo has a public feed of transactions, but it is kind of interesting when you Go into Venmo and you see like, oh, my ex is going on sushi dates with a new person. So it's, it's interesting though, like, yeah, log into Venmo. It's, it's more interesting than logging into, I don't know, your Chase account. There's no interesting social feed. So I could see why the company's have an incentive to build things to be public by default and encourage you to overshare.

[Beau Friedlender]

Sure.

[Tracy Chow]

But it's not good for you as an individual to have all the information out there.

[Beau Friedlender]

So now you built, you literally built. Now for folks listening, is it an app they can download? Is it an extension that goes on Chrome? What is it, who can have it and how do they use it?

[Tracy Chow]

Blogparty is a browser extension that you can install to your Chrome, Firefox, Edge, et cetera. So it sits on top of your browser and it runs similarly to a virus scanner where you press a button to have it go scan it will check your social account. So it will check like all these ones that we've been talking about, Venmo Strava, like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter. Also things that you wouldn't necessarily consider social media, but there's a lot of your personal data linked to them, like Google and YouTube.

[Beau Friedlender]

Like your image that you have as your Google account pops up where Apple does the same.

[Tracy Chow]

Yeah. So it will scan all those things and flag potential risks to you that you may want to fix. So Google is an interesting one where most people don't think of that as social media, but you have probably a profile photo associated with it. By default, that photo is public. So if somebody is trying to guess what your email account is and they type in your, your email account into like the Gmail autocomplete, if they've guessed correctly, it'll bring up your profile photo. Somebody who's just trying to really.

[Beau Friedlender]

That's why my picture is a red African Daisy. It's a Gerber Daisy.

[Tracy Chow]

So yeah, that, that's great security, good job.

[Beau Friedlender]

Now you know.

[Tracy Chow]

But that sort of thing will flag that for you and say like, hey, maybe you want to make this not public. There's a potential risk factor here. If you accept the recommendations, click a button. Block Party will go and fix all of those for you. If you want to go read through all of the changes in much more detail, you're also welcome to do that. Or one thing that is more nuanced about what we're building with Block Party is that the way we exist on social media with these different accounts, it's gonna be different for each person. On some, some platforms, maybe you wanna build a bigger following. Like maybe there is a platform for you which is like the one where you're building an audience. Maybe that's Twitter for you or maybe that's LinkedIn. You wanna be more public and maybe there's another account where that's for friends and family only. It needs to be really locked down. Or you have different trade offs you might wanna make. So there may be cases where you want to go through and look at what these trade offs are. But what blockparty does suggests much better defaults across the board and you can always still go and fix them. But the defaults that Block Party is giving you and there's like one click fix are much better than you get when you sign up for the platforms.

[Disney Plus Advertiser]

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[Tracy Chow]

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[Interviewer or Legal Deposition Participant]

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[Beau Friedlender]

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[Tracy Chow]

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[Beau Friedlender]

Hit new habitats.

[Sam's Club Advertiser]

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[Disney Plus Advertiser]

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[State Farm Advertiser]

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[Beau Friedlender]

When I first heard of blockparty, I thought it was like another media company trying to get me to be friendly with my neighbors, which I'm fine. I live in the woods. Anyway, then I learned what it actually was and I thought, oh my God, that's genius. Because threat actors are really serious and they live off the insecurities built into social media. 100% they'll, they'll create a deep fake. Hey, it's me. I'm. I'm sucking Wherever Danbury. I need money and it sounds just like me. And because you know who to send it to, who knows? Me too. Like it might work.

[Tracy Chow]

Yeah.

[Beau Friedlender]

What's the response been to blockparty?

[Tracy Chow]

Yeah. With enterprise customers that we're talking to, increasingly there's a realization that the security perimeter has to involve the people. It's no longer sufficient to just lock down your computers and your devices and the network. On the technical side.

[Beau Friedlender]

You're kidding.

[Tracy Chow]

Turns out the people are the big compromise vector. Humans fallible. Ah, I know. Maybe when we're all replaced with AI agents, it'll be better. Or actually not. They're even worse for security.

[Beau Friedlender]

But I was gonna say they. You can just make them hallucinate and be like, sure, come on in, whatever.

[Tracy Chow]

Yeah. But there's increasing the realization that humans need to be protected as well. And this is a very important tool to help secure the humans who also, like, sit as, like, one person, both professional and personal. So they have these accounts that represent their personal lives, but they're using them in professional capacities, especially LinkedIn, Twitter for some folks. Some other platforms too, where you are blending your professional brand with your personal identity. And there's this very porous boundary between you as an individual and you as an employee who might get compromised and targeted. So the response on the security side is like, oh, yes. Like, this is. This is very important. Like, this used to be something that was difficult to try to guard against because it is quite awkward if you're a security person to go to an employee at the company and say, like, okay, let's pull up all your personal social media so we can lock it down. That feels. That feels just a little awkward.

[Beau Friedlender]

Well, it feels like it might even be constitutionally problematic.

[Tracy Chow]

Yes, but in this case, where it can be a tool that runs and people can often like, oh, I'm just locking things down. It's not somebody on it or security who's sitting with a human to look at all their personal accounts and lock things down. It feels much better. It's also just much more effective. A number of the folks that we have sold to, sold our product to, would previously be running workshops manually to get people into a room and say, okay, we're blocking three hours to go clean up your account so you don't get attacked. And it becomes a problem for not just you, but, like, the company as well. So to be able to have a tool that automates all this stuff is pretty great. Saves everybody a lot of time and makes things a lot more effective.

[Beau Friedlender]

So true or false, like a lot of scammers, threat actors, they're going in through social media and going, I see who Tracy's maybe not mom is or friend or whatever. They went out for drinks. I know who that is. And I have her voice print. You're toast.

[Tracy Chow]

Yeah. We actually have an example that hit pretty close to home with an intern who was with Block Party last summer.

[Beau Friedlender]

Okay.

[Tracy Chow]

Proudly posted on LinkedIn in her first couple of days that she was working at blockparty and got targeted with a scam. Somebody pretending to be me texted her, messaging her to buy a bunch of gift cards and then referencing bunch of people on the team. And she fell for it. She thought it was me telling her to go buy gift cards. When it all came out, she was like, I thought it was you. Because you're mentioning all these people. Like, it seemed like they knew everybody. It just seemed like it was you. I was like, well, yes. So you remember how you posted on LinkedIn that you were joining Block Party and you've connected with everybody? It's pretty easy to figure out who all your connections are, who's on the team. Like, all that information came literally from things that you had done very publicly. It was a learning moment.

[Beau Friedlender]

LinkedIn even allows you to see who someone's connections are, like, who you have in common. That's bonkers.

[Tracy Chow]

Yeah. Yeah. It's by default, very public. It's very easy to see people's connections if they have not gone to special effort to lock them down. And, like, that gets used in these phishing attacks because messages from scammers seem very realistic when they cite real details of people that you work with. And they get all the context right, because all that context is out there for them to scrape and use against you.

[Beau Friedlender]

Context is everything, and it always has been, long before tech took over. It used to be an asset. Not anymore. It's a liability. So is Block Party a form of advocacy?

[Tracy Chow]

It is. It is showing the world that we can have agency, we can have better. It doesn't have to be that hard. And we can make things better for ourselves. And we can have more choice about being online. We can get good things without the bad. We don't have to just be victims of what greater powers have decided we should experience. And we can choose this experience that we have. Before I built Block Priority, there were folks. It's like, it's just really hard to solve these problems. Like, we can't keep people safe online. Like, it's a hard problem. Like, they're there. Like, you're so cute. You think that it's so easy to solve these problems, but it's not. It's just. It's just beyond what is possible. And then I built Block Party and people were like, wait, that's actually not that hard to make things better. What do you know? So I think it's advocacy in that way of showing what is possible when you care and put your energies towards doing better.

[Beau Friedlender]

Tracy Chow, thank you so much for joining what the Hack today. It was a pleasure to talk to you.

[Tracy Chow]

Thank you for letting me share some of my stories.

[Beau Friedlender]

Okay, so here's the part that we didn't say in the beginning. Tracy Chow just joined Delete Me in a way, and Block Party and Delete Me are now working together. They're Delete Me acquired Block Party.

[Tracy Chow]

I am terribly excited that DeleteMe has acquired block Party because it means that we will be able to protect that many more people at so much more scale, and it's really accelerating our mission to help keep people safe online. DeleteMe has been a big brand in the space. All of the customers that we talk to are Delete Me customers. Yeah, it's pretty amazing. When we talk to these folks, they're like, oh, yeah, we roll out Deleteme and Block Party together because you're different aspects of the same thing. Removing your data online. Very complimentary. This is great that, you know, we can protect people in these different aspects of, like, getting their data off data brokers and also off social media. So such a natural fit.

[Beau Friedlender]

I'm so. I am honestly so stoked to have gotten to know you a little bit, Tracy, because, you know, everyone at Delete Me is not going to get that opportunity as much as I. There's 500 of us. Come on. But I really just so, so glad to hear that you're a part that we're actually joining in arms and going after, you know, the things that can be gotten.

[Tracy Chow]

Go, team.

[Beau Friedlender]

All right, now it's time for the Tinfoil Swan, our paranoid takeaway to keep you safe on and offline this week. It's really simple. You need to go and check your privacy settings on social media. If you already are a customer of Delete Me, then it's going to become a lot easier for you real soon. But if you're not, and most of us have a lot of accounts, right? I have at least four. I have four. And by the way, I'm not active on all of them. That doesn't mean I'm not exposed. So go through all of them and check your privacy policy, your settings, not policy. See how you're. See how and what you're sharing. And if you're not comfortable with what you're sharing. Shut it down. That's it. I'm not going to walk you through every one. You can do this. Make sure your privacy settings are not sharing stuff like where you are, who you're with, and all the rest and who you know and be safe out there. See you next week. This episode of what the Hack was produced by me and Andrew Stephen, who also did the editing. What the Hack is a production of Delete Me, which was picked by the New York Times Wirecutter as the number one personal information removal service. You should be using it already. If you're not and you want to, well, you can. Here's what to do. Go to joindeleteme.com wth that's joindeleteme.com WTH and get 20% off. I kid you not. 20%. 20% off. That's joindeleteme.Com WTH now. Stay safe out there. See you around.

[Hiba Balfaki]

Not all darkness is dangerous. Sometimes it's the doorway to becoming whole. On the brand new podcast the Shadow Sessions, hosted by me, Hiba Balfaki, a psychologist and trauma expert, we shed light on the hidden corners of the human experience through raw, unfiltered conversations from the edge of healing. The Shadow Sessions invites you to do the deeper work that leads to real change. Follow the Shadow Sessions wherever you're listening now.

[Colin Cole or Heather Villanueva]

Sometimes it feels like red and blue states are just as divergent as post World War II east and West Germany. So what can the US learn from German political history in order to create a more perfect union? Find out on the new season of the Future of Our Former Democracy, the Signal Award winning podcast from More Equitable Democracy and Large Media, hosted by me, Colin Cole and Heather Villanueva. It's time to rethink democracy. So follow the Future of Our Former Democracy wherever you get your podcasts.