Information technology can and should be part of Friends’ work. It can help Friends build strong communities of support for their own members, and it can help Friends promote our testimonies of support for other people in need. However, constructive use of information technology (IT) can only be achieved through judicious use that connects and empowers people while avoiding the substantial harms that IT has the potential to cause.
Many Friends, in my experience, have an ambiguous relationship with IT, which has not prepared them for the judicious use of IT that will be needed for maintaining our beloved community in the face of extreme economic disruption or government oppression. Aware of the utility and ubiquity of email, social media, the internet, and audio-video teleconferencing, many Friends use these tools somewhat reluctantly and warily, knowing how the tools also contribute to divisiveness and the spread of disinformation, hate, and fear in our nation. But such an “arm’s length” relationship can hinder our ability to use IT to support and advance our commitment to justice, equality, and love.
Skills of careful discernment about IT and abilities to securely implement IT may become urgently needed in the near future, should extremists succeed in using fear and violence to replace our imperfect democratic government with an authoritarian regime based on minority rule, suppressed civil liberties, and retribution towards anyone they identify as “other.” Friends’ faith and practice require us to remain ready to give aid and comfort the oppressed and dispossessed. To fulfill this calling under a potential authoritarian regime, we would need secure channels of communication, or the authorities could use surveillance to uncover and suppress the work of liberation.
I propose three areas of learning and implementation for Friends, so that we can strengthen our collective IT resources: 1) establish and protect individual “digital identities,” 2) maintain the privacy and security of messages, and 3) build right-sized online community platforms.
Your personal digital identity: You may think of yourself as “having” a variety of computer accounts, each providing a limited function or benefit for you: an email account, a social media account, an account with an online retailer, an account with an online newspaper, and so on. In fact, many of us have accumulated scores of such accounts. But thinking of them as “possessions” like books or boots or baking pans is misleading, and it is not how most of the providers of these accounts think of them. Instead, they see these accounts as components of an elaborate and detailed digital identity that comprises a disturbingly detailed composite description of you – not merely your name, address, and banking details, but also personal traits of you and your family, including habits, travel, interests, and opinions.
Nearly every link you click when you browse the web or use social media is captured, sold, added to your online profile. Your detailed digital identity is valuable to retailers, hucksters, criminals, and governments because it enables them to manipulate you. Manipulation is more than a mere nuisance, more even than profiteering. The information in your digital identity can be used to impersonate you. Impersonation could be used to access your online financial accounts, harass you or your family, or post messages that seem to come “from you” and that damage your credibility.
Measures to protect your digital identity start by limiting the information you willingly provide to others. Do not share information without a clear purpose and need, and limit that sharing as narrowly as feasible. Many social media posts, quizzes, or puzzles are designed to solicit seemingly innocuous information about you, which in combination can enable a bad actor to impersonate you. If you share intemperate remarks or inappropriate images, those will remain part of your digital identity essentially forever; they can be found and used, even years later, by anyone seeking to diminish you or your work.
Next, secure your accounts (logins). We’ve all seen warnings about passwords, but many people excuse the use of passwords that are very easy for bad actors to guess because they wrongly suppose no one would be interested. Pass phrases of several words (e.g., “Aunt Polly’s 1967 Pontiac”) are more difficult to “crack” than single strings, and easier to type than random strings of characters. Do not reuse passwords for different accounts because even if your password is secure and hard to guess, services that have a copy of your password are prime targets of bad actors and are all too commonly compromised. If you reuse a password with different services, the damage to your digital identity can be more extensive. Use a secure password manager to keep track of the unavoidably many passwords you will need. Whenever possible, add the additional protection of multi-factor authentication, such as the biometric readers on newer smartphones and computers, or a mobile app that generates a one-time-use passcode. Those are much less subject to tampering than SMS texts and telephone call-backs.
Web browsers enable detailed tracking of the sites you visit. You can reduce the amount of information you are providing by choosing to accept “only necessary cookies” when given a choice, by removing cookies after visiting a site (though this requires understanding your browser’s complex and constantly changing settings and preferences), and by using the “private” or “incognito” window option (which hides a good deal of data being shared between different sites). You can gain additional protection of your privacy and the integrity of you communications by using a virtual private network or VPN. VPNs encrypt your information before it leaves your computer or phone, and also obscures your internet address.
Integrity of communications with others: The practices suggested above for maintaining your authentic digital identity are equally important for protecting your friends and colleagues. Consider, for example, the potential consequences of posting images on social media that show you and your colleagues at some political event for some cause – ceasefire in Gaza, increase school funding, oppose book bans, or end the militarization of local police. Those seemingly unproblematic demonstrations could result in some of your colleagues facing harassment or other negative consequences. Face-matching software identifies individuals’ advocacy to prying employers, political opponents, and hate groups. Law enforcement can also use face recognition software for surveillance and tracking. Of course, it might be valuable for a cause to show everyone who supports it, but make sure you get the consent of others before you post their images in social media.
All of the content you share online – emails, social media posts, documents, and images – are potentially available to bad actors to exploit. Consider measures to make that information less susceptible to abuse. If you use “free” services, generally the provider of the service can mine your information to add to its profile of you and of other people you mention. You can reduce this vulnerability by subscribing to a paid service that does not retain that right or even provides encryption of your data, so that neither the service nor anyone who gains access to it can decrypt and read that data. An example of such a service is Proton Mail, which also houses your data in Switzerland, making it less available to prying eyes.
Your phone and other web-based devices routinely track and record their location in detail. This information may be available to anyone who gains control of your device. Law enforcement agencies may obtain and use that information in some circumstances. Those data can tie you to participation in an event. As with posting information to social media, your information may impact others by revealing times and locations of your meetings with them. If you find yourself facilitating someone escaping predation, you may want to leave your “smart” device behind or prevent it from sending or receiving all signals by encasing it in a “Faraday cage.”
Facilitating communities: The information I have shared above encourages Friends to minimize their incautious uses of IT. However, these technologies provide real value and service, and I don’t mean to suggest that Friends should avoid them, only that we should be cautious. The core intent of this article is actually to encourage thoughtful, constructive, community-building uses of IT, which I will explore below. The core advice here is that Friends should take care to choose an IT tool or service that is appropriate for a specific need.
Major IT vendors encourage potential clients to fold most of their IT-based activity into one all-inclusive “environment,” which may include a web browser, email, news source, instant messaging, word processor, and file storage. Vendors design these environments to seem convenient and easy, by explicitly designing different components to work with one another with similar “look and feel.” But these all-in-one environments are proprietary, so (not incidentally) they push other members of the community into adopting the same proprietary environment.
Rather than all-in-one solutions, better choices of tools are often available for specific needs. Some are preferable because they are not proprietary and do not require community members to subscribe to or work in a proprietary environment. Many documents, for example, can be readily shared as plain text, “rich text,” or PDF documents. Each of those text formats can be read and edited by many different tools on most brands of computers or smart phones, thus being freed from dependency on a proprietary environment.
Different purposes or stages in a project are best facilitated by different tools. Brainstorming of ideas is an ideal function for an online “white board” tool. Ongoing discussions of specific topics or concerns can benefit from threaded chat tools such as Slack, which facilitate better organization and recording of discussions than simple email threads do. Collaborative writing tools allow multiple authors to simultaneously edit a document and see one another’s changes in real time. Google Docs excels at this function, enabling “instant recording” of on-line meetings as well as iterative editing of a document by multiple authors. But you will want to export the final document into a generic format and publish or archive it with tools designed for that purpose, such as a file archiving service, or a web site or wiki for broad public consumption.
Many Friends have become adept users of on-line and “hybrid” meeting tools. While we fondly remember gathering quietly in simple surroundings absent the distractions of technology, on-line and “hybrid” meetings have become important practices for outreach and accommodation in our meetings. Recognizing that we face a “new normal” here, rather than a temporary inconvenience, Friends can be thoughtful about the ways they use these technologies.
I learned some helpful terminology from Pastor Loletta Barret of Whittier First Friends, which helps to equalize Friends’ participation in hybrid meetings. Her advice is to designate participants as either “on line” or “on site,” and to emphasize that all participants are “in person.” That of course entails some accommodation for each. On-line participants are not merely “virtual” participants: despite hearing through speakers and viewing on a screen, in-person presence requires attention rather than succumbing to local distractions and ineffective multi-tasking. If on-line participants keep their camera on, this helps everyone be present. On-site participants need an effective means to see and hear on-line participants, which will likely entail deploying one or more large video monitors and speakers, and they need to speak so as to be heard and seen by on-line participants. On-site Friends should follow the good practice of standing to minister. Technology specifically designed for an on-site group participating in audio-video conferencing can automatically focus audio and video on the person speaking to provide a more immersive experience for on-line participants; Meeting Owl is a relatively reasonably priced option that offers this feature and which has proven successful in many environments.
Many on-line participants make do with low quality speakers and microphones, but you will enhance every participant’s experience and ability to follow the conversation by obtaining and using a good quality microphone. If you must join from a noisy location, “bone conduction” microphones reduce background sounds, and noise-cancelling headphones will help on-line participants focus on the meeting. If you find yourself organizing or clerking on-line or hybrid meetings, you can increase your effectiveness by configuring two monitors - one of which can maintain the view of participants, the other of which can display a shared screen.
Friends have adapted and adopted technology in the past as new circumstances arose that called Friends to act. Our discriminating use of IT can strengthen our faith and practice in challenging times.
David Banz is a long-time university IT administrator and long-time member of the General Committee of Friends Committee on National Legislation. He is a member of Chena Ridge Friends Meeting in Fairbanks, Alaska (Alaska Yearly Meeting).