    
Securing Sexuality is the podcast and conference promoting sex positive, science based, and secure interpersonal relationships. We give people tips for safer sex in a digital age. We help sextech innovators and toy designers produce safer products. And we educate mental health and medical professionals on these topics so they can better advise their clients. Securing Sexuality provides sex therapists with continuing education (CEs) for AASECT, SSTAR, and SASH around cyber sexuality and social media, and more.
Links from this week's episode: 
Understanding Privacy as a Social and Relational Issue
In the digital age, where technology has permeated every aspect of our lives, the intersection of intimacy and information security has become a complex and pressing issue. As we increasingly rely on digital platforms for communication, socialization, and even intimate connections, it is crucial to navigate the delicate balance between privacy, trust, and authenticity. This blog post explores the challenges and considerations associated with maintaining privacy and trust while fostering genuine connections in the digital realm.
With the advent of social media, online dating platforms, and communication apps, our personal information has become more accessible than ever before. While these platforms offer convenience and connection, they also present significant privacy concerns. Our digital footprints, consisting of personal data, preferences, and even intimate details, are stored and analyzed by corporations, governments, and potential hackers. This raises questions about who has access to our information and how it may be used or exploited. To navigate the intersection of intimacy and information security, individuals must take proactive steps to safeguard their privacy. This involves being mindful of the information shared online, using secure communication channels, and carefully managing privacy settings on social media platforms. Additionally, individuals should be cautious when sharing intimate details with others online, as they may be vulnerable to manipulation or exploitation. By remaining vigilant and informed, individuals can mitigate the risks associated with privacy breaches. Trust is an essential component of any intimate connection, whether it be a romantic relationship or a close friendship. However, building trust in the digital realm presents unique challenges. In face-to-face interactions, we rely on non-verbal cues and shared experiences to gauge trustworthiness. In contrast, online connections lack these tangible elements, making it difficult to discern authenticity and intentions. To foster trust in the digital realm, individuals must be transparent and authentic in their online interactions. This involves being honest about one's identity, intentions, and limitations. Furthermore, it is crucial to verify the authenticity of others by conducting thorough background checks, verifying identities, and seeking references whenever possible. Authenticity is another critical aspect of intimate connections that can be challenged in the digital age. Online platforms allow individuals to curate their digital personas, presenting an idealized version of themselves to the world. This can lead to a lack of authenticity and hinder genuine connections. To navigate this challenge, it is important to prioritize authenticity in online interactions. This involves being genuine, vulnerable, and honest about one's thoughts, feelings, and experiences. By embracing authenticity, individuals can foster deeper and more meaningful connections in the digital realm. Finding the balance between intimacy and information security is a delicate task. While it is important to maintain privacy and protect personal information, it is equally vital to be vulnerable and open in intimate connections. Striking this balance requires conscious effort and consideration. One approach to achieving this balance is through open and honest communication. Discussing privacy concerns, boundaries, and expectations with potential partners or friends can help establish a mutual understanding and create a foundation of trust. Additionally, individuals should prioritize their own well-being and maintain a healthy level of skepticism when sharing intimate information online. The intersection of intimacy and information security in the digital age presents numerous challenges and considerations. Privacy concerns, building trust, and fostering authenticity all play crucial roles in navigating this complex landscape. By being proactive, transparent, and authentic in our online interactions, we can foster genuine connections while safeguarding our personal information. It is through a careful balancing act that we can navigate the intersection of intimacy and information security in the digital age. Key Concepts:
Hello and welcome to Securing Sexuality. The podcast where we discuss the intersection of intimacy and information security. We are on the road this week. And so Stefani is keynoting some conferences, Wolf and Stef are presenting at a couple of different things, including RSA, one of the largest information security conferences in San Francisco. So buckle up. I hope you enjoy. We're going to bring you in just a moment. This is a recording of Stefani's talk from San Francisco at the RSA conference:
I am Stefani Goerlich. That's me. Hi. I am a clinical social worker. I'm a professor. I'm a author. I'm a certified sex therapist. What I am not, we'll get into. But let's start with what I am. Often when I talk in tech spaces, people want to know what is a sex therapist. So let's start with that because I was told it's really important to establish my security credentials at RSA. So I wanna be really transparent from the get go. So what is a sex therapist? In order to be a sex therapist, you first have to be a fully licenced mental health provider already. You can't even train if you have a limited license. From there you train in human sexuality. In the psychology of relationships and lifespan, development and all sorts of different things. You have to work primarily in the field of relational and sexual health. And that last part, that cyber criminology student that's not at all relevant. I actually dropped out of the program because I found out that we were citing my friends in the textbook, and I was spending more time making fun of the textbook on Twitter than I was learning anything. So my security credentials are I have none. And I wanted to just own that upfront because you guys are going to have an interesting technology conversation with somebody who is an absolute outsider in this world. And if you are comfortable with that, we are going to have fun. And also, I'm gonna make you a little sad, but only briefly. Cool? All right, this is gonna be fun. I do have some tangential techs. I often describe myself as being tech adjacent. My partner is in cybersecurity, and he and I do a weekly podcast and a bi-annual conference called Securing Sexuality where we talk about the intersection of intimacy and technology, which is how I end up giving talks like this at places like that when I have the credentials that I do. So if anybody's interested in what it looks like when a sex therapist and a hacker have conversations, that's where and how we do that. Often. When I say that I am a therapist who talks about technology, people assume I'm talking about some very specific things. They assume I'm talking about porn or that my clients have problems with online gaming. Then I'm focusing on revenge porn or non consensual materials. Radicalization has become a big topic in the mental health space or infidelity, especially online relationships. And I have lots of colleagues that do work on all of these issues. But what I primarily talk about when I'm talking about technology is this guy. If you're confused, it's OK, I will explain, but does everybody know who that is? That is the elf on the shelf Exactly. And I am on a one clinician mission to show that he is at the root of a really problematic security culture that's developing, and I'll explain as we go, we're gonna talk a lot about how people are starting to communicate today. And I promise my entire talk is not Christmas theme. But we're gonna start with how kids learn communication, how kids learn intimacy. And we're gonna build out to what that means for us as a society and for you as the builders, breakers and protectors of the cyber society that we all live and are part of now. So, historically, communication has what we call pull communication. Has anybody ever heard this term before? Pull Communication versus push? I see some nothing. So historically, if I wanted information, if I wanted to communicate with somebody, I had to go to that. I had to drag it out. I had to walk physically to my mailbox. I had to call the operator and have them connect me. I had to send in a critical emergency when I needed to get a hold of somebody really fast. A Western Union telegram, Our information did not come to us. We had to go to it. We were pulling information in. More recently, we have been pushing our communication, and this is only in about the last 50 years and honestly somewhat Are you 30. So by the time we have landline telephones that are not party lines or controlled by the operator, where I can pick up my phone and directly connect to you now we're talking push communication because I can make your phone ring whether you want it to or not. I am pushing my presence into your space, early Internet, AOL. How many of you are Gen Xers and get a little visceral thrill every time that you've got mail thing pops up somewhere? Yeah, that's what we call early erotic imprinting. And it's real text messaging in the same way that I used to have to go to my mailbox. Oh, that got really loud, really fast. I used to have to go to my mailbox if I wanted to talk to somebody. I had the option to pick up my phone if I wanted to talk to somebody. Now my phone tells me they want to talk to me, and this has expanded into push notifications that are actually causing statistical anxiety in people. People pick up their phone. They see half a dozen red buttons with different numbers. and they experience an anxiety because it's already there. They can't ignore the mail for the weekend. They can't put their phone on, they can put it on. Do not disturb. But much more of our information is being pushed at us instead of being something we choose into. And this is representing a generational divide in how people communicate. The older you are, the more comfortable you are with pull communication. The younger you are, the more comfortable you are with push communication, and that sounds really simple, but it's changing the way relationships are happening. My son is 24 and when his grandmother says, Call me or write me a letter, that's just not gonna happen. So we're starting to see a generational divide that's impacting how people communicate, and that's impacting our understanding of technology. I have been told in my peer review, this is a really basic slide for this audience, so I'm not actually going to explain it. I'm just gonna talk about it while you review, because there's nothing more boring than somebody that reads a slide to you anyway. So our 24 and unders, our young millennials above, Gen. Alphas below. Gen Z feel very comfortable with technology. They have never known a time when they haven't. You all know this. The problem is, is that technology is developing in a way that it's creating new social problems that a they're not necessarily recognising because it's built into the cultural water that they're swimming in. And B is presenting new psychological and social challenges and how they think about things like privacy. Things like intimacy, things like relationships. So what does that look like? Information is fabulous. We have rapid access to information of the entire contents of human knowledge on my phone. In my pocket, however, that comes with data mining and tracking. I can talk to anybody, anywhere in the world without a problem or a mediator, but they can also watch me. My son is a two time transplant recipient. I am all about advances in health care. He has had surgeries that were overseen by doctors on other continents. Amazing. However, when we can communicate with people on other continents, it becomes problematic in terms of how they can access us and how we can access them. Right now, we're living in a moment where we are seeing a huge amount of social activism, but that also comes with things like abuse doxing and out there, time and space management. Phenomenal. Half the apps here are designed to make us more productive and more organised, but that opens up the potential for stochastic care. So anybody heard that term? All right, I'm gonna explain it with a caveat. I'm going to give you a real life example that I watched play out in real time. What I do not want you to do is get hung up on the topic. I want you to focus on the behaviour. Cool. All right. So I was doing a podcast episode with my partner where we were talking about state surveillance of people seeking various forms of healthcare, reproductive health care, gender affirming care and how the changes in laws were impacting the way that state law enforcement agencies were now tracking and surveilling people. We finished that podcast. I log into reddit because I spend way too much time on Reddit. And in one of the women centred subreddits, I saw a message from a girl who was in a situation that she found terrifying and she was looking for hope and help, and she gave up a lot of personal information. We knew she lived with her parents. We knew she was in a relationship with her boyfriend. We knew she was about to graduate. We knew the state that she was in. We knew a lot about her, and I showed that post to my partner. And I said, This is exactly what we were talking about like this is really concerning. People need to be careful about what they're putting online, went to bed, woke up the next morning, and that post had been screen gabbed posted on four GM and people were actively talking about How can we find her? How can we target her? How can we stop her? Regardless of how we feel about the specific situation? We can replace that with any situation, and it would not be OK. So that is what I'm talking about. When I'm talking about stochastic care, I'm talking about online dog Pilling taking to an extreme so technology isn't scary to the younger generation. And yet when we're developing things we need to be talking about and thinking about how outside adversaries are going to respond to things, how they are going to corrupt them, how they are going to misuse them. people have been talking about, you know, things like air tags. Right now it's great. I can find my luggage. Also, my banner can find me we need to be developing for these unforeseen outcomes. We need to be focusing on individual use cases not necessarily always organisational, but thinking about for every technology. How could this be misused under what circumstances? Who would be impacted? And what can we do to build in protections? That's really what I'm talking about today. And Sheila, I just realised I forgot to start my personal timer. So I am gonna need you to time. Keep me also. What was she thinking? Right? That's our first thought. It's a little bit victim. Blame me. It's a little bit judgy, but from a cybersecurity perspective, we're like Girl, do not put that online. Do not tell them that you're graduating from the University of Texas and you live at home and you have a boyfriend. That's a lot of information to triangulate, but we do because generationally this is how we communicate. Now we use information as social currency. We share information about ourselves to build relationships, and it is true. Historically, we have always done that, but it's changing in some really problematic ways. So we all know what privacy is, especially privacy professionals, from a mental health perspective. From a clinical perspective, the important thing is for us to understand that privacy is what lets us set and maintain healthy boundaries, which I don't think is something that security people think about when they talk about security or when they talk about privacy. They're thinking of thread actors. They're thinking of Ransomware. They're thinking of different sort of vulnerabilities. But how often do we think about it as social and relational? Boundary setting? Not to victim blame our poor girl in Texas, but she was so comfortable sharing so much information because the idea of what health boundaries are has changed and they have changed because of technology and because of things like the elf on the shelf. So this is one of my favourite quotes that I actually learned from my partner. It's one of his favourite quotes, too. When you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck. When you invent the plane, you also invent the plane crash. And when you invent electricity, you invent electrocution. Every technology carries its own negativity, which is invented at the same time as technical progress. Your role is to be thinking about these negative outcomes to be imagining the plane crash to be threat, modelling the train wreck so that we can protect people. Which brings me back to the elf on the shelf. He started as a modern sort of cultural gimmick. Right? Every holiday season, something comes out. There's Tickle Me Elmo. There's whatever is trendy. Elf on the shelf very quickly moved from being a seasonal trend to being an American cultural tradition. There are entire social media accounts dedicated to moms, typically moms posting the different ways. They position their elf every night, creating ideas for it, creating backgrounds and narratives. They teach their Children to view their little elves as actual people in their lives that are trained. If you look at the narrative behind elf on the shelf to surveil the Children, the whole tradition of this holiday is the elf is there to watch you, and every night the elf leaves and the Elf reports back to Santa. What's going on? And all of a sudden something that would have been really creepy when I was a kid becomes a beloved holiday tradition. We're teaching our toddlers that surveillance is a family value and that to be watched and monitored and reported on is how we celebrate and embrace tradition and family. You can now buy things like elf on the shelf surveillance cameras. You can buy holiday decor that says this house is under surveillance. There is Spy Cam Christmas ornaments. It's really creepy when you actually pause to think about it. And the problem is, is that it doesn't stop with small Children and elf on the shelf. Because we have such a tech immersive generation. Now that we are creating not only toys that play into that like baby's first streamer, but also additional surveillance tech that follows them across the generations, you can get cute little robots that your kids can put on the table next to them that will let you watch them to make sure they're doing your homework and let you yell at them. When you see that they're not, you can give your daughters. Beautiful jewellery that happens to have GPS locators in it. Anybody else feel weird about this? And it starts with this idea that our beloved family tradition is this cute little guy that reports on you every night. I work with a lot of couples. I'm primarily a relationship therapist, and every year I have so many conversations about Alpha Michel. He's really become my one woman like cybersecurity mission because it starts out with just normalising the idea of familial surveillance. And then it grows into more surveillance. And then it grows into teaching each other how to surveil our partners. Because if you grow up in a household or in a culture in a community where it is normalised for you to be watched from cradle to grave, then your understanding of intimacy is going to be I love you, so I watch you. You're important to me, so I protect you by taking care of you. There are thousands of Instagram reels and tiktok videos teaching not only parents how to surveil their teenagers but young adults how to surveil their partners, and it's not looked at as abusive or creepy. It's been normalised because we have decided as a society that surveillance is love and love is surveillance. Which brings me back to your world. I was doing an exercise with a couple that I worked with one of them was concerned about their partner's Internet usage technology usage. And I'm like, OK, let's let's let's make a road map. Let's look at how you use technology in your life And when I really started thinking about it, this cradle to grave surveillance thing isn't just limited to young kids. We're raising now. It is something we have all already embraced. So hypothetically, I meet my partner online. He and I get married. We decide we wanna have a family using a fertility tracker to help that happen. Kids come along households full. We both have full time jobs. The kids have their own schedules. We clearly need some way to communicate when we're not in the house at the same time. So we bring in the household organisers. I might say technology is bad for Children, and I'm gonna keep my Children off the Internet until they're at least 13. But I can't because starting in first grade, all of my child's academic stuff is online. If I want to communicate with the teacher Power school, if my kid wants to see his homework Power school, if I wanna know my kids' grades Power school, this causes some issues. Maybe we need to talk as a family about our level of surveillance the way that we communicate with one another. But that's awesome, because I can do that online now, too. I can amplify my therapy side note. As a therapist, I have big feelings about this. Talk to me later, but the point is it exists and it's possible. But we get the kids through the adolescence. We survive the teenage years. We move into adulthood. Now I'm ageing and I need care. My kids are now taking on my role, but it's cool because there's an app for that, too. They can use an app to hire my hair, my caregivers, to watch my home health aides to manage my money to control what's happening in my world. And then when I die, they can put my eulogies, my memorials and live through my funeral. From the minute we're born until the minute we die, especially those ones that start with the I found the love of my life and decided to have a baby. It is a lifetime cradle to grave data collection, and this becomes especially creepy when we bring a I into it, because now the new latest and greatest is one I died. My partner can download all of my social media into a chatbot, which will replicate me for them forever. That's the work. it's gross, it's concerning. And it starts with making a holiday tradition out of teaching our Children that this is OK and it starts with us just embracing technology as a society as a culture, without thinking about the bigger patterns. The great myth of our time is that technology is communication. So I said, I'm a therapist. I said, I'm a sex therapist. I do a lot with couples. Let's talk about communication. Most people that I work with that are single want to be dating online. However, only about 30% of Americans have used the dating website ever. How many of you would have thought that was higher? Because we've all been taught? That's just how you do it now, right? Everything is online. We've already established that so we're gonna find our people online, too. But most people actually aren't. 53% of people under 30 have used online dating. So even when we're talking about those digital natives, it's not necessarily where they're going to find partners. But they believe that it is. Only 9% have used an online dating platform in the last year. And these numbers are weird because I spend a lot of time with people that wonder why they're not meeting people online. Wonder what they're doing wrong. Wonder why their person isn't out there and it's because most people aren't actually using this. You might be wondering who is we're gonna get to that only one in 10 people met their partners online. Full transparency. I am one of them. Two. We have two in the audience but it's an anomaly, right? Like we talk about it as if it's the norm, and then this is fascinating. 56% of women have been harassed and 63% of men have been scammed. So if most people aren't on it and those that are on it are only successful about 10% of the time, why are we dealing with all of that? And who are we talking to? In those moments, 47% of all Internet traffic came from bots. Now, this is fascinating. When I was getting my feedback for this talk, this was one of the things that RS a actually asked me about. They're like, Cite your source. This seems unreasonable. Where did you find this? When I went back to get the data for them, the company that had done the study had released their 2023 report, and it's now actually 49.6%. They're starting to talk about it in terms of a dead Internet where it's all just bots talking to each other, and occasionally we stumble into something useful. And yet, from the minute we're born until the minute we die, we are feeding all of our information into the system. 60% of people feel lonely on a regular basis. That's a huge number I learned last night that one of my heroines, Doctor Roof, I'm sure you're shocked to know that a sex therapist loves Doctor Roof has just been made ambassador to loneliness for the state of New York. Her next book coming out in October is 100 ways to build connections with people because people have lost the ability to do that, we assume it should happen online. We assume it should be mediated for us. We assume connections are pushed communications, 58% feel like nobody in their lives really know them, and 49 have fewer than three friends. Now here's the thing. They don't break that down between IRL friends and online friends. And most of us I know I do have huge populations of online friends, So let's assume that they included that group. How many of those friends are real? We're already seeing a trend that I think is fascinating where single people are setting up chat bots to do their initial point of contact on dating websites like Guys will set up a bot to just say, Hey, you're gorgeous repeatedly to everybody because if they do it to 10,000 profiles, one's gotta respond, right. But then women are being harassed, so women are setting up chat bots saying, Look for these things, say no. If these things aren't there, say thank you, it's nice to talk to you and there have been multiple cases now of people who have found their partners in formed relationships where their initial communication wasn't even them. It was two bots talking to each other, and at a certain point both of them went OK. This seems cool and they moved into real life. So what does this mean for people as a public health crisis? You would think if loneliness is a problem, relationships are the cure. But more and more millennials are actually co-habitating not because they have found their person, but because they can't afford to live alone. 33% of people report feeling lonely in their marriage, and 53% of all divorces are because I just couldn't talk to them. So relationships are not a cure. And that's an important word because we are talking about an actual public health crisis. Loneliness has been declared by the surgeon general to be a public health crisis. Why? Because when you are chronically lonely, you experience heart disease. Your risk of stroke increases your risk for dementia increases, diabetes, depression, anxiety addiction, cognitive decline and suicide. And all of these are exacerbated if you're part of a minority community, is loneliness compounded by loneliness. So this is not just an information security threat. This is a health threat. This is a relationship threat. This is a social threat. And this is where I told you I was gonna make you a little bit sad for a minute. I wanna pause and ask, Does anybody in this room recognise that picture? Awesome. I'm about to tell you a story. Please do not google it because the videos are out there and it will make you sadder. And I have carefully calibrated the level of sadness for this audience. If you were my grad students and we were in a trauma class, I would make you all much sadder. So in the fifties behavioural researcher named Harry Harlow who sounds like he should be making stop motion stop motion monster movies. But he did not wanted to study attachment because historically, the idea of attachment didn't really exist. If you go back to the tutor areas or ancient Greece, Children were just considered tiny adults. There was no concept of developmental psychology. There was no concept of child development. The idea of teenagers as a distinct age group did not exist until after World War Two, the stock hoppers and the greasers. Those were the first teenagers historically speaking. And in the Victorian era, the twenties thirties forties, a very sort of formal and distant approach to parenting was the norm. Victorian parenting manuals would tell you when your kids come down in the morning, greet them with a firm handshake because you don't want to coddle them. And Harry Harlow is like, But is that actually good for kids? You know what happens if small humans do not get the emotional support that they need? And he did a series of experiments that were incredibly important for science and would never, ever be allowed. Now what he did, among other studies, was take baby capucci monkeys and create two artificial mothers. One was a chicken wire frame and that had the bottle with the milk. The other was a chicken wire frame wrapped in cloth, and it was warm. But it had no food, and what they very quickly learned was that the baby monkeys would starve rather than give up touch and connection that the emotional closeness, the need to feel held and safe and warm and connected was a greater evolutionary impulse than food. So how do we tie this to technology? There's a great deal of evidence that social connectedness is a very strong predictor of emotional well being. And there's no question that social isolation has greatly increased in our culture in the last 50 years. Conveniently, we're talking about that same generation of push technology that same generation, couple decades of mediated digital relationships. Each of us is now electronically connected to the entire globe, and yet we feel utterly alone. There has never been a time in human history where any one of us could reach out to more people, have more conversations, attend more events, meet more things, can connect with everybody in the world. And yet loneliness is an all time high, and it is literally killing us. So my hypothesis as your tech adjacent, not at all security minded sex therapist, is that we are starting to confuse surveillance with connection and information sharing with intimacy. And for those of you in your world, both of these present a problem because it's one thing to say. Tell your users to turn on multi factor, tell your users to have a strong password but it goes much deeper when we're talking about. Tell your users not to do those things that make them feel connected. Tell your users to pick the food, not the soft one, but emotionally, psychologically. That is exactly the situation that we are in right now. I figured you guys would be a little bit sad if you came to a talk with a sex therapist. So I didn't touch on something a little bit sexy, right, because I've made you sad. So let's talk about a new trend in porn. Millennials and Gen. Z have completely embraced the the sex ed lesson of porn is not reality. You can't look at real sex by porn. They know that. But they're also not watching that. They are specifically seeking out erotic material that feels real. That shows authenticity that shows real humans having what look like very real connected experiences. Importance of authenticity as a virtue in pornography. Amateurism is logic, one that carries through many sites, including social network, digital dating, pornography. It conveys intimacy. Young people have become so isolated, so lonely, so disconnected, they are so hung up on the soft, warm digital mother that doesn't give them real sustenance that they're eroticized realness now on one hand. Good right. Like as a sexual health expert, I would like people to have realistic ideas of what sex and relationship should be. But the thing about the way that people's erotic maps work and the way that human sexuality is defined generation to generation is that we usually fetishize the stuff that we can't access socially. The things that are hidden or prohibited or just not available are the things that become fetishized, eroticized and sexualized. So while this is a great thing, if we're talking about wanting people to have realistic ideas of their relationships, it's a problematic thing. If we're seeing a trend of people fetishizing real fetishizing, authentic, sexualizing intimacy, good sex should be intimate sex. But intimacy should also be able to exist without being sexualized. And if the very idea of having a connected, intimate relationship has become generationally fetishized, I am telling you, as a sex therapist, we have gotten sideways somewhere as a tech community because this is a red flag. So what do we do about it? What happens when this happens? We talked about privacy, but this has some repercussions, right? We have romance and confidence. Scams are through the roof right now. My partner and I I mentioned we do our podcast. We do our conference. We are set up as a 501 C three nonprofit And one of the things that we do is pro bono consulting usually for people in my world whose clients are having some of these issues. And the biggest trend that we're seeing right now is romance scams and big butchery. Doxing not new. Been around for a while. Huge problem. Online harassment has gone through the roof. And the thing about this psychologically is we often think about online harassment as an antisocial behaviour, and it is. But what we don't think about is that it is an antisocial request for intimacy. The people that are harassing people are doing it because in some way, shape or form they want to be close to that person. They want to be noticed. They want to be heard. They want to be validated. The increase in online harassment is a response to loneliness. Non consensual sexual material going through the roof right now. Exploitation of people. This is massive and This is one of the things that you guys talk about a lot in your world. You know, the human factor, the they were lonely and I made friends with them, and that's how I got their badge. And that's how I got their company's money. Radicalization, massive, massive problem right now, in a lot of different ways. So this isn't an issue specific thing. This is a culture thing. I don't care what somebody believes or what their politics are. There is a radical radical community online waiting to encourage them. Identity theft all and bounty hunting. Bounty hunting is very new. Certain states have passed legislation that incentivizes surveillance of our friends and neighbours. Right. There are laws that have been passed. Texas is a big one. Texas is the one that made the news most. That actually offers a financial incentive to watch your neighbours watch your friends monitor very intimate personal things like their birth control usage or their pregnancy status, or whether or not their kid is gender divergent and to literally call hotlines and report to the state. Utah just set one up that has been flooded with foster class as an act of protest. But when we start by normalising surveillances, family, intimacy I, I watch you because I love you. That turns into I give you information because I want you to love me. Becomes normalised as a society that a healthy member of society, a good citizen is a citizen that is surveilling their peers. And we are financially rewarding that right now. So what do we do about it? How do we fix it? This is the part where I remind you I am not a technologist and I am going to give you my asks as a non technologist. The things that I want you to do for us. Please don't ask me how I will point you towards my partner and you guys can talk about the house. OK, cool. What do we need from you? Authentication needs to be real authentication. There needs to be some way for people to vet those 49.6% of bots on the Internet. We need deep fake detection that's starting to happen. Some of the social media platforms are starting to flag things or require that things be flagged. But it's still mostly a voluntary reporting system and There's no consistent way for people to know if what they see online is real, and this is causing a level of psychological distress I cannot describe. I have conversations with so many people my colleagues, my clients. I do a lot of expert witness work attorneys people that reach out to us for consultation, that just wanna know. How can I know that what I'm seeing is real? How can I believe that audio clip, that video clip that picture that news story. And we have talked to some of the leading experts in this area, and the answer right now is you can't we live really in a post truth world. And until the technology catches up and gives us a way to discern, just take a minute and think about what that means for the lay people who might not even know the term deep fake Yet, which sounds strange in this audience. But I have met them at our conference last year, a therapist, a 20 year therapist with a graduate degree, asked what chat GP P is. You cannot assume that people outside of the RS a bubble no, these technologies and they don't have a way to differentiate until you guys build it. Thoughtful moderation. Fun Fact. My therapy practise has been Perma banned from Instagram and Facebook because I use the word sex in an ADOS because I'm a certified sex therapist. That's literally what my profession is. And the Centre for Intimate Justice, which is amazing, doing fabulous work on the topic of online censorship specifically of women's health and of sexual health information. They worked with Meta and with Google to create this huge consent agreement that they weren't gonna do that anymore. The executive director of Centre for Intimate Justice reached out to Meta like Why? Why are you blocking her? They said, Because we have friends that work at Meta. There's a system for insiders to put in a separate. This is wrong, guys request still blocked. This is not me complaining. I've gotten used to it, and I'm a good enough therapist that I can get business without advertising. But it's not about me. I'm just the example. It's about sex educators. It's about advocates. It's about young people seeking real information. It's about mental health providers trying to help people stay alive and stay healthy and get out of abusive relationships. We need to have a form of moderation that isn't based on keywords or on outdated ideas of propriety. It's fascinating to me that women's health products get censored pretty consistently on instagram, but erectile meds by mail, not a problem. Data collection protocols. I'm not going to spend a lot of time on this because this is your bread and butter. This is so you guys are here all week talking about stuff like this, but I'm wondering how many of you before this room have actually sat and thought about that lifespan thing. Often, we tend to think about data collection in the context of wherever we're working or whatever we project we're on. I would love it if everybody here would start thinking about what is my company collecting and why, and how does that inform or disrupt this lifespan process? Security push alerts, catfishing, romance scams? This is that thoughtful moderation put into action. This is where keywords would be helpful when somebody says we have such a connection, but I can't afford to pay for my subscription on Bumble next month. Can we move this to WhatsApp? That should trigger a push Notification. Warning. This is a common indicator of fraud. Be careful in how you proceed. You don't need to tell them what to do but let them know we've stepped into iffy territory and algorithms for good. So what does that mean? I started off in the beginning by saying that half the traffic is bots that everybody thinks we're meeting online. But really we're not. And that loneliness has become a pervasive crisis. The problem with the way that data and technology has been monetized right now is that there's every financial incentive to keep users online. Totally get it. I don't even wanna look at my social media usage numbers on my phone. I get it, I. I do not practise what I preach, and I will own that. But that's again where the developers come in. That's where the makers come in. I would really love it if you guys would start developing algorithms that encourage people to move offline, not on the WhatsApp, but we need to be helping them find connections. Find the real, the real pictures, the real voices, the real humans, the real everything and then somehow moving them off of the screen into the real world. As I like to put it, I would really like it if you could be slippery and not sticky. I realise that it's antithetical to everything we know about monetization of the Internet right now. That is my big ask. But I really think it is crucial for a public health from a relationship and from a technology perspective, the problem we are having right now is that I like to look at data. Well, a good longitudinal study, that authenticity kink quote that I gave you was from a 50 year meta analysis of every study that's been done on porn since 1970. I really like that sort of stuff right now. Technology is moving so fast, we don't have time to do the research. There is no pause for us to know what the actual outcomes are, what the consequences are. What does this mean for us? As a species, as a culture, as a community, as a couple, as a family? There is no way of knowing this is entirely uncharted ground, and I strongly suspect that if I were allowed to keynote and I were to ask everybody in RS a Can you all just pause? Stop building. Stop releasing. Stop doing everything for 10 years. Let us get a little baby Longitudinal data and then we'll know what you guys should be doing. I would be laughed off the stage, and yet that is where we are. We can already measure our harm. We can already see social trends. And the only people in the room that can actually influence or disrupt those trends are you. My tech adjacent itself can't do it. I just help fix the problems when they've come up. So what do I need from you next week? Please consider the way your organisation services and your work touches people. I want to focus on touches people. Last fall, we did our Securing Sexuality conference. We did it in Detroit. It was amazing. It was awesome. If you've ever been in like an awkward high school setting. On the first night, you had all the therapists on one side of the room and all the hackers on the other side of the room, and they were coming up to like I'd really like to talk to a hacker, but I don't know what to say they were like the sex therapists are really cool, but I don't know how to approach them. And by day two, everybody was mingling and talking and collaborating. Last night I had dinner with one of my sexology icons and one of my happer friends here in San Francisco, like it did amazing things. But coming out of one of our workshops, my partner overheard one of our technologists that had me So thank God, nothing I do touch is human. So let me say everything you do touches the human and knowing that is crucial to doing ethical, moral, socially responsive work. Next three months, identify your zero day loneliness, vulnerabilities in your products and your services. And I suspect many of you have never thought about it in that language before. Think about how what you build, what you sell, what you support. What you break brings people closer together or pushes them further apart. Do threat model acts for intimate partner violence, stochastic terrorism and everything in between. Please, for the love of God, think about how what you do can be misused by people that are not you. We are idealistic utopian people when the Internet first came out, we genuinely thought that, you know, if everybody could just talk to one another, there would be world peace. And it turns out that's not how that works. I have a background in domestic violence, sexual assault, survivor advocacy. Currently, I teach two universities. I teach sexual trauma and trauma informed care. I teach sexual dysfunction. I teach paraphilia and digital sexuality and social media, and I have had to build entire units on technology abuse and digital violence because it has become so pervasive. identify ways to close the authenticity gap, help people know what is real, who is real, where and when you can. I know that's the bigger lift. And then in six months, figure out controls for data mining for surveillance, for stalking exploitation. We know that people are going to give information because we have taught them now for a generation and a half that you give information to earn love. You give information to show that you're in a relationship. We're not going to break that cycle until we kill the elf on the shelf, which I'm open to. But until that point, we're not actually going to train away what we have taught people to do. So what we need to do is put in guard rails to protect them and then be slippery, not sticky. Find ways have conversations. Maybe it is aspirational. Maybe it's something that you have in the, you know, strategic plan for five years out. How can we both make money as a company and encourage real connection? Meaningful connection offline connection? Until we start asking the question, we'll never find the answers and I'm not gonna have them. That's your work. I'm just here to tell you about the problems. So you are definitely here. Everything you do, I don't know who you are. I don't know your companies. I don't know what your roles are. Every single thing you do touches the human, and we really, really want to make sure that we are creating a world that lets people have safe, healthy, authentic, genuine, meaningful relationships. 
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