One-on-one coaching on the basics of privacy.
Hey, I’m Durian! I’m offering lessons for people who want to learn and improve their digital privacy.
I’ve spent more than a decade working on tools that help resist mass surveillance at DuckDuckGo, Tor Project, and Delta Chat, and I’ve also given talks to activists on digital privacy and security. I can help you navigate and understand the basics of digital privacy, and my goal with these sessions is to give you the tools that you need to assess new technologies moving forward. Here are some things that I can help with:
We’re all waking up to the fact that a lot of the technologies that we use and depend on are silently watching us so that they can predict our behavior, sell us products, share our whereabouts with governments, and train their AI.
This is wildly lucrative to these companies, and they use this power to aid in occupations and genocides, help weapons companies, crack down on activists, aid in war, and gobble up all available land and electricity. These surveillance technologies are quite literally everywhere, and a lot of it is invisible so it’s difficult to have an understanding of everything that’s going on.
How we'll be doing our sessions together.
Everyone's needs are different and there are often tradeoffs when it comes to privacy. We'll meet virtually to talk about what you value, what you care about, and what privacy means to you and your community so that we can create the foundations of our plan.
We'll take concrete steps to work on improving your privacy. We'll discuss habits and tools that you can use, and we'll talk about how we can make a realistic and sustainable transition. You'll be doing 'homework' here as well—I'll be your guide, but we'll have limited time together so you'll have to take the time to continue the work outside of our sessions.
Surveillance technology sits in the intersection of capitalism and policing, and underneath all of that we'll also see that the technology is imbued with white supremacy and patriarchy as well. Technology is not neutral and we're swimming against the current here so expect resistance and work as we go through our sessions.
There are no tests or certifications here so there's really no pressure on how much or how often you'd like to meet. You can learn at your own pace! We can meet once a week or even once a month if you'd like. I'm currently on the Eastern Time time zone, and we can schedule a meeting that works for both of us.
Our first call where we get to know about each other and talk about your goals will be free. After that, I’m doing a sliding scale between $30 to $60 per hour depending on your capacity.
Send me an email about yourself and what you’d like to get out of these sessions so that we can schedule our first call.
I’m also open to working with a group of people as well, but it depends on my capacity and time. Feel free to contact me if you think that’s something I can help with.