The Open Privacy Research Society is turning five! 🎂🍰🎉

We want to take this opportunity to extend a big thank you to everyone who helps support our work, enabling us to build awesome tools like @cwtch_im or dive deep on important research.

Thank you! 💜

We have upgraded our Bitcoin donation infrastructure to @BtcpayServer - no more static address!

Help support us build free and open source privacy systems!

openprivacy.ca/donate/#donate…

We now have an official @cwtch_im address!

If you would like to contact us without exposing metadata or content to anyone else then cwtch is the preferred method.

cwtch:vcdayosqjmn7zm3oi2s2an5s724zg2dvwdafhdop67rssyedgzxfmoqd

We have new thank you gifts!

Donations of $5 or more receive stickers as a thank-you gift, and $25 or more gets you one of our new sticker sheets!

Donations of $50 or more can claim a new, limited edition, Privacy is Consent t-shirt.

We have already written tests for a large portion of basic Cwtch UI functionality and we plan to continue this over the next few weeks while improving step definition and custom environments.

Cwtch Beta 1.6 will be the first version to benefit from these changes.

These changes allow us to quickly specify non-trivial test cases that exercise large parts of the stack.

e.g. "Then I expect to see the message 'yay the test worked' replying to 'hello! this is a test!' within 5 seconds"

We just posted a Patreons only post talking about the UI design progress we've been making (with pics) and approaching a Cwtch Beta. If you'd like early access, check out our Patreon!

patreon.com/posts/open-pri…

44.57% of all donations to Open Privacy were via $BTC, $XMR or $ZEC!

Zcash took the lead from Bitcoin this year thanks in part to a very generous donation by the @ZcashFoundation which we have used to further the development of Cwtch.

We spent much of our time pushing forward on our flagship metadata resistant application Cwtch. Improving Android support, localization and support for multiple profiles.

(Expect more Cwtch announcements this Month!)

Soon.

Release: Lockbox encrypted web forms! Arising from our work on community mutual aid funds, Lockbox provides a simple app for managing encryption keys for submission forms on shared/untrusted hosting, helping safeguard the privacy of applicants: openprivacy.ca/blog/2020/04/1…

<3

Keep an eye on Tapir, which is a reimagined anonymous p2p library inspired by our work on libricochet-go but offers a more robust authentication protocol and is designed to allow more interesting applications to be built on top.

git.openprivacy.ca/cwtch.im/tapir

We were very happy to see @BCInfoPrivacy take this breach of patient records very seriously, and understanding that the scope possibly extended far beyond Vancouver, requesting other health authorities be contacted.

We now know that our initial disclosure (in November 2018) was effectively ignored until @FrancescaFionda reached out to them in August 2019.

"Details as to paging system and how it worked (or was supposed to work) were nebulous"

Between research & development, disclosure of critical cryptographic & privacy issues in public infrastructure & working with communities to close privacy gaps, 2019 has been an amazing year!

Please help us get closer to our 2019 fundraising goal!

openprivacy.ca/donate/

This #GivingTuesday please consider donating (via $BTC, $XMR, $ZEC, Patreon or Paypal) to support the research and development of privacy technologies that focus on the communities that need them the most.

Help us reach our 2019 goal!

openprivacy.ca/donate/

#GivingTuesdayCA

Watch your mailboxes! Today we mailed out 50+ t-shirts from our #SpeakMathToPower campaign, to supporters in 10 countries on 4 continents!!

Thank you all so much!!

#SpeakMathToPower t-shirts have arrived at @OpenPriv headquarters! We will be dispatching to supporters soon!

Thanks to many amazing individuals & institutions we have seen a donation surge & have now raised $128k CAD in projected donations this year.

Thank you all so much! We have some exciting work in the pipeline, be on the lookout for upcoming announcements.

openprivacy.ca/donate/

#SpeakMathToPower Sticker Proofs Are Here!

Because of those donations we were able to fund projects like Cwtch, taking prototype code and transforming it into usable metadata resistant alpha desktop & mobile app.

20% of our support comes from recurring donations, mostly via Patreon. At the end of the 2018 financial year Open Privacy had 88 pledges contributing $972 USD/month to support our development of privacy technologies focused on marginalized communities.

Some amazing figures, in our 2018 financial year (11th February 2018 - 10th February 2019) 61.27% of all donations to Open Privacy were via $BTC, $XMR or $ZEC!

We are really excited to reveal our finalized #SpeakMathToPower t-shirt design! We are so excited in fact that we're re-opening the campaign for one-time donations until this Friday!

Donate $75 or more via Bitcoin, Monero, Zcash or Paypal to claim!

openprivacy.ca/donate/

"VCH takes patient privacy very seriously and is actively working to mitigate the privacy risks you have identified. Please note, however, that VCH has no information to suggest that patient information has been compromised or used for a malicious purpose."

We cannot say for certain how many patients have been impacted by this breach. We suspect that this breach has likely been on going for several years.

We have asked VCH a number of questions regarding how they plan to inform patients about this breach.

openprivacy.ca/blog/2019/09/0…

Did you know that cryptocurrency donations made up 60% of our funding in 2018?

We updated our website to make our cryptocurrency donation options more visible.

openprivacy.ca

Our alpha UI now supports 4 different languages! Thank you so much to our alpha testers, translators, and everyone else who has supported development so far!

The next Cwtch alpha release will include an option for Brazilian-Portuegues thanks to @agentofuser <3

It's been just over a week since we launched it and we have already reached 5% of our 2019 fund raising goal!

Please help us in raising the money we need to research, build and secure technologies with the communities that need them the most.

openprivacy.ca/donate/

:) youtube.com/watch?v=03E6Yz…

Happy Valentine's Day! 💜💜💜

What better day to launch the alpha of a project designed to bring people together safely and securely than on Valentine’s day?

Cwtch is our metadata resistant, group messaging tool Time for truly consensual applications!

openprivacy.ca/blog/2019/02/1…

We also support a number of ways for you to support us with a one time donation, including via Bitcoin ($BTC), Monero ($XMR) and Zcash ($ZEC)

See out donate page for addresses: openprivacy.ca/donate/

We get the best mail in our PO Box! Thank you so much to @sonyaellenmann, @JeffLadish and @ClassWithNoble who organized the Blockchain Against Evil event last month in San Francisco and donated the proceeds to Open Privacy!

We've already been working with @NormanShamas on a few initiatives and now we are very excited to welcome them onto our board!

openprivacy.ca/about

Listen to two of our founders,@errorinn and @dan_ballard, talk with @canadianlefty about why they started Open Privacy, our focus on marginalized communities and our goals for our first project, Cwtch: rabble.ca/podcasts/shows…

Shoutout to all our amazing Patrons who made @errorinn spend the afternoon stuffing all these stickers into envelopes! 44 patrons across 3 continents, 27 envelopes, and 52 stamps in our first month! (You can have some too: patreon.com/openprivacy)

We keep growing in really exciting and cool ways! We are pleased to announce Cynthia Khoo (@Cyn_K) as the newest member of our board!

openprivacy.ca/about/