Privacy Party Is Block Party’s Bold Response To Twitter’s API Changes: The New Haven For Online Privacy
Block Party, a startup initially centered on curbing online harassment via Twitter’s API, has undergone a significant pivot in the wake of API changes on the platform now known as X.
Privacy Party
Tracy Chou, a prominent software engineer and tech diversity advocate, introduced the venture’s new focus at this year’s SXSW conference in Austin.
The reinvented platform Privacy Party emerges as a solution to the complex challenge of managing privacy settings across various social networks, including Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Reddit, and X.
Originally, Block Party leveraged Twitter’s API to simplify the process of blocking trolls and harassers.
The project garnered significant attention, raising $4.8 million in seed funding in 2022.
But Twitter’s unforeseen policy shift, marked by restricted API access, left Block Party’s original functionality in limbo.
It is now rebranded as Block Party Classic.
Block Party Classic
The new direction for Block Party, Privacy Party, addresses a different yet equally pressing online concern: navigating the maze of privacy settings across multiple social platforms.
Conversations inspired this pivot – with newsroom security teams expressing a need for more robust tools to safeguard journalists from online threats such as doxing and stalking.
“In addition to getting a lot of harassment, journalists sometimes have to face threats like doxing, stalking, and death threats,” Chou told TechCrunch.
“Personal social media creates a lot of surface areas for vulnerability, so the security recommendation is always to lock things down.”
Others who want to clean up their social media accounts, for example, when job hunting, often find changing privacy settings difficult and time-consuming.
This is because the websites often change how things are set up or make it hard on purpose, either to keep using your data or to meet legal requirements.
What Can The Tool Do?
Privacy Party operates as a middleware, facilitating users’ interaction with social platforms to modify privacy settings efficiently.
The tool exemplifies the process of adjusting settings on platforms like Facebook, where even simple tasks like privatizing a photo album can be unnecessarily complex.
Privacy Party’s browser extension aims to streamline this process, offering customized recommendations and running background scans to identify and adjust privacy settings.
This extension delves beyond surface-level settings, tackling aspects like contact permissions, visibility of personal information, access granted to third-party apps, and the availability of historical content.
Currently in beta, Privacy Party supports various platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Reddit, Strava, X, and Venmo.
It offers a free, user-friendly tool for managing privacy settings, a critical aspect in today’s digital age, where data security and personal privacy are paramount.
While the exit from beta has not been announced, the platform remains free for users, embodying Chou’s commitment to fostering a safer and more private online environment.
