Good article from 404 Media on the cozy surveillance relationship between local Oregon police and ICE:

In the email thread, crime analysts from several local police departments and the FBI introduced themselves to each other and made lists of surveillance tools and tactics they have access to and felt comfortable using, and in some cases offered to perform surveillance for their colleagues in other departments. The thread also includes a member of ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) and members of Oregon’s State Police. In the thread, called the “Southern Oregon Analyst Group,” some members talked about making fake social media profiles to surveil people, and others discussed being excited to learn and try new surveillance techniques. The emails show both the wide array of surveillance tools that are available to even small police departments in the United States and also shows informal collaboration between local police departments and federal agencies, when ordinarily agencies like ICE are expected to follow their own legal processes for carrying out the surveillance...

In-house attorneys say it was illegal for Attorney General Rob Bonta (D) to hire an outside firm to oversee the high-profile case against the oil industry.

Analysts say the administration's anti-wind policies could delay or cancel more than $100 billion in offshore investment.

A new analysis shows that almost every nation failed to submit stronger goals for reducing carbon pollution by the Paris Agreement's deadline.

A POLITICO analysis identified 794 planned clean electricity generation facilities — mostly in GOP districts — that could lose subsidies under the House bill. The Senate is debating changes.

The findings come as President Donald Trump’s proposed budget cuts jeopardize the data-gathering missions and other forecasting tools.

The bill, which awaits the governor's signature, aims to lower the carbon intensity of the Oregon Public Employees Retirement Fund.

Republican leaders are racing to pass the legislation before Independence Day.

Galena, a sprawling village of 400 people along the Yukon River, is shifting to clean energy to reduce its reliance on expensive, imported diesel.

New research on six staple crops found that rice alone would have the smallest decline in global yields.

The scorching conditions for a wide swath of the country from Chicago to New York are forecast to last through next week.

Torrential rains over steep coastal mountains and the landslides and flooding they could generate are an ongoing concern for officials.

Water makes up around 60 percent of the human body. More than half of this water sloshes around inside the cells that make up organs and tissues. Much of the remaining water flows in the nooks and crannies between cells, much like seawater between grains of sand.

Now, MIT engineers have found that this “intercellular” fluid plays a major role in how tissues respond when squeezed, pressed, or physically deformed. Their findings could help scientists understand how cells, tissues, and organs physically adapt to conditions such as aging, cancer, diabetes, and certain neuromuscular diseases.

In a paper appearing today in Nature Physics, the researchers show that when a tissue is pressed or squeezed, it is more compliant and relaxes more quickly when the fluid between its cells flows easily. When the cells are packed together and there is less room for intercellular flow, the tissue as a whole is stiffer and resists being pressed or squeezed.

The findings challenge conventional wisdom, which has assumed that a tissue’s compliance depends mainly on what’s inside, rather than around, a cell. Now that the researchers have shown that intercellular flow determines how tissues will adapt to physical forces, the results can be applied to understand a wide range of physiological conditions, including how muscles withstand exercise and recover from injury, and how a tissue’s physical adaptability may affect the progression of aging, cancer, and other medical conditions.

The team envisions the results could also inform the design of artificial tissues and organs. For instance, in engineering artificial tissue, scientists might optimize intercellular flow within the tissue to improve its function or resilience. The researchers suspect that intercellular flow could also be a route for delivering nutrients or therapies, either to heal a tissue or eradicate a tumor.

“People know there is a lot of fluid between cells in tissues, but how important that is, in particular in tissue deformation, is completely ignored,” says Ming Guo, associate professor of mechanical engineering at MIT. “Now we really show we can observe this flow. And as the tissue deforms, flow between cells dominates the behavior. So, let’s pay attention to this when we study diseases and engineer tissues.”

Guo is a co-author of the new study, which includes lead author and MIT postdoc Fan Liu PhD ’24, along with Bo Gao and Hui Li of Beijing Normal University, and Liran Lei and Shuainan Liu of Peking Union Medical College.

Pressed and squeezed

The tissues and organs in our body are constantly undergoing physical deformations, from the large stretch and strain of muscles during motion to the small and steady contractions of the heart. In some cases, how easily tissues adapt to deformation can relate to how quickly a person can recover from, for instance, an allergic reaction, a sports injury, or a brain stroke. However, exactly what sets a tissue’s response to deformation is largely unknown.

Guo and his group at MIT looked into the mechanics of tissue deformation, and the role of intercellular flow in particular, following a study they published in 2020. In that study, they focused on tumors and observed the way in which fluid can flow from the center of a tumor out to its edges, through the cracks and crevices between individual tumor cells. They found that when a tumor was squeezed or pressed, the intercellular flow increased, acting as a conveyor belt to transport fluid from the center to the edges. Intercellular flow, they found, could fuel tumor invasion into surrounding regions.

In their new study, the team looked to see what role this intercellular flow might play in other, noncancerous tissues.

“Whether you allow the fluid to flow between cells or not seems to have a major impact,” Guo says. “So we decided to look beyond tumors to see how this flow influences how other tissues respond to deformation.”

A fluid pancake

Guo, Liu, and their colleagues studied the intercellular flow in a variety of biological tissues, including cells derived from pancreatic tissue. They carried out experiments in which they first cultured small clusters of tissue, each measuring less than a quarter of a millimeter wide and numbering tens of thousands of individual cells. They placed each tissue cluster in a custom-designed testing platform that the team built specifically for the study.

“These microtissue samples are in this sweet zone where they are too large to see with atomic force microscopy techniques and too small for bulkier devices,” Guo says. “So, we decided to build a device.”

The researchers adapted a high-precision microbalance that measures minute changes in weight. They combined this with a step motor that is designed to press down on a sample with nanometer precision. The team placed tissue clusters one at a time on the balance and recorded each cluster’s changing weight as it relaxed from a sphere into the shape of a pancake in response to the compression. The team also took videos of the clusters as they were squeezed.

For each type of tissue, the team made clusters of varying sizes. They reasoned that if the tissue’s response is ruled by the flow between cells, then the bigger a tissue, the longer it should take for water to seep through, and therefore, the longer it should take the tissue to relax. It should take the same amount of time, regardless of size, if a tissue’s response is determined by the structure of the tissue rather than fluid.

Over multiple experiments with a variety of tissue types and sizes, the team observed a similar trend: The bigger the cluster, the longer it took to relax, indicating that intercellular flow dominates a tissue’s response to deformation.

“We show that this intercellular flow is a crucial component to be considered in the fundamental understanding of tissue mechanics and also applications in engineering living systems,” Liu says.

Going forward, the team plans to look into how intercellular flow influences brain function, particularly in disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease.

“Intercellular or interstitial flow can help you remove waste and deliver nutrients to the brain,” Liu adds. “Enhancing this flow in some cases might be a good thing.”

“As this work shows, as we apply pressure to a tissue, fluid will flow,” Guo says. “In the future, we can think of designing ways to massage a tissue to allow fluid to transport nutrients between cells.”

More than half of the nation’s 623,218 bridges are experiencing significant deterioration. Through an in-field case study conducted in western Massachusetts, a team led by the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in collaboration with researchers from the MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering (MechE) has just successfully demonstrated that 3D printing may provide a cost-effective, minimally disruptive solution.

“Anytime you drive, you go under or over a corroded bridge,” says Simos Gerasimidis, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at UMass Amherst and former visiting professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at MIT, in a press release. “They are everywhere. It’s impossible to avoid, and their condition often shows significant deterioration. We know the numbers.”

The numbers, according to the American Society of Civil Engineers’ 2025 Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, are staggering: Across the United States, 49.1 percent of the nation’s 623,218 bridges are in “fair” condition and 6.8 percent are in “poor” condition. The projected cost to restore all of these failing bridges exceeds $191 billion.

A proof-of-concept repair took place last month on a small, corroded section of a bridge in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. The technique, called cold spray, can extend the life of beams, reinforcing them with newly deposited steel. The process accelerates particles of powdered steel in heated, compressed gas, and then a technician uses an applicator to spray the steel onto the beam. Repeated sprays create multiple layers, restoring thickness and other structural properties.

This method has proven to be an effective solution for other large structures like submarines, airplanes, and ships, but bridges present a problem on a greater scale. Unlike movable vessels, stationary bridges cannot be brought to the 3D printer — the printer must be brought on-site — and, to lessen systemic impacts, repairs must also be made with minimal disruptions to traffic, which the new approach allows.

“Now that we’ve completed this proof-of-concept repair, we see a clear path to a solution that is much faster, less costly, easier, and less invasive,” says Gerasimidis. “To our knowledge, this is a first. Of course, there is some R&D that needs to be developed, but this is a huge milestone to that.”

“This is a tremendous collaboration where cutting-edge technology is brought to address a critical need for infrastructure in the commonwealth and across the United States,” says John Hart, Class of 1922 Professor and head of the Department of MechE at MIT. Hart and Haden Quinlan, senior program manager in the Center for Advanced Production Technologies at MIT, are leading MIT’s efforts in in the project. Hart is also faculty co-lead of the recently announced MIT Initiative for New Manufacturing.

“Integrating digital systems with advanced physical processing is the future of infrastructure,” says Quinlan. “We’re excited to have moved this technology beyond the lab and into the field, and grateful to our collaborators in making this work possible.”

UMass says the Massachusetts Department of Transportation (MassDOT) has been a valued research partner, helping to identify the problem and providing essential support for the development and demonstration of the technology. Technical guidance and funding support were provided by the MassDOT Highway Division and the Research and Technology Transfer Program.

Equipment for this project was supported through the Massachusetts Manufacturing Innovation Initiative, a statewide program led by the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative (MassTech)’s Center for Advanced Manufacturing that helps bridge the gap between innovation and commercialization in hard tech manufacturing.

“It’s a very Massachusetts success story,” Gerasimidis says. “It involves MassDOT being open-minded to new ideas. It involves UMass and MIT putting [together] the brains to do it. It involves MassTech to bring manufacturing back to Massachusetts. So, I think it’s a win-win for everyone involved here.”

The bridge in Great Barrington is scheduled for demolition in a few years. After demolition occurs, the recently-sprayed beams will be taken back to UMass for testing and measurement to study how well the deposited steel powder adhered to the structure in the field compared to in a controlled lab setting, if it corroded further after it was sprayed, and determine its mechanical properties.

This demonstration builds on several years of research by the UMass and MIT teams, including development of a “digital thread” approach to scan corroded beam surfaces and determine material deposition profiles, alongside laboratory studies of cold spray and other additive manufacturing approaches that are suited to field deployment.

Altogether, this work is a collaborative effort among UMass Amherst, MIT MechE, MassDOT, the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative (MassTech), the U.S. Department of Transportation, and the Federal Highway Administration. Research reports are available on the MassDOT website.  

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 20 June 2025; doi:10.1038/s41558-025-02369-z

Video games are a popular method for climate change communication, but current efforts undervalue the potential role of gaming communities. To empower gaming communities to take climate action, we suggest social strategies including fostering climate change conversations through games and in gaming social spaces, and organizing real-world gaming community events.

You'll get a custom EFF35 Challenge Coin when you become a monthly or annual Sustaining Donor by July 10. It’s that simple.

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We're saying thanks to new and upgrading Sustaining Donors by offering brand new EFF35 Challenge Coins as a literal token of thanks. Challenge coins follow a long tradition of offering a symbol of kinship and respect for great achievements—and we owe our strength to tech creators and users like you. EFF challenge coins are individually numbered for each supporter and only available while supplies last.

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Two articles crossed my path recently. First, a discussion of all the video Waymo has from outside its cars: in this case related to the LA protests. Second, a discussion of all the video Tesla has from inside its cars.

Lots of things are collecting lots of video of lots of other things. How and under what rules that video is used and reused will be a continuing source of debate.

When the Earth froze over, where did life shelter? MIT scientists say one refuge may have been pools of melted ice that dotted the planet’s icy surface.

In a study appearing today in Nature Communications, the researchers report that 635 million to 720 million years ago, during periods known as “Snowball Earth,” when much of the planet was covered in ice, some of our ancient cellular ancestors could have waited things out in meltwater ponds.

The scientists found that eukaryotes — complex cellular lifeforms that eventually evolved into the diverse multicellular life we see today — could have survived the global freeze by living in shallow pools of water. These small, watery oases may have persisted atop relatively shallow ice sheets present in equatorial regions. There, the ice surface could accumulate dark-colored dust and debris from below, which enhanced its ability to melt into pools. At temperatures hovering around 0 degrees Celsius, the resulting meltwater ponds could have served as habitable environments for certain forms of early complex life.

The team drew its conclusions based on an analysis of modern-day meltwater ponds. Today in Antarctica, small pools of melted ice can be found along the margins of ice sheets. The conditions along these polar ice sheets are similar to what likely existed along ice sheets near the equator during Snowball Earth.

The researchers analyzed samples from a variety of meltwater ponds located on the McMurdo Ice Shelf in an area that was first described by members of Robert Falcon Scott's 1903 expedition as “dirty ice.” The MIT researchers discovered clear signatures of eukaryotic life in every pond. The communities of eukaryotes varied from pond to pond, revealing a surprising diversity of life across the setting. The team also found that salinity plays a key role in the kind of life a pond can host: Ponds that were more brackish or salty had more similar eukaryotic communities, which differed from those in ponds with fresher waters.

“We’ve shown that meltwater ponds are valid candidates for where early eukaryotes could have sheltered during these planet-wide glaciation events,” says lead author Fatima Husain, a graduate student in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS). “This shows us that diversity is present and possible in these sorts of settings. It’s really a story of life’s resilience.”

The study’s MIT co-authors include Schlumberger Professor of Geobiology Roger Summons and former postdoc Thomas Evans, along with Jasmin Millar of Cardiff University, Anne Jungblut at the Natural History Museum in London, and Ian Hawes of the University of Waikato in New Zealand.

Polar plunge

“Snowball Earth” is the colloquial term for periods of time in Earth history during which the planet iced over. It is often used as a reference to the two consecutive, multi-million-year glaciation events which took place during the Cryogenian Period, which geologists refer to as the time between 635 and 720 million years ago. Whether the Earth was more of a hardened snowball or a softer “slushball” is still up for debate. But scientists are certain of one thing: Most of the planet was plunged into a deep freeze, with average global temperatures of minus 50 degrees Celsius. The question has been: How and where did life survive?

“We’re interested in understanding the foundations of complex life on Earth. We see evidence for eukaryotes before and after the Cryogenian in the fossil record, but we largely lack direct evidence of where they may have lived during,” Husain says. “The great part of this mystery is, we know life survived. We’re just trying to understand how and where.”

There are a number of ideas for where organisms could have sheltered during Snowball Earth, including in certain patches of the open ocean (if such environments existed), in and around deep-sea hydrothermal vents, and under ice sheets. In considering meltwater ponds, Husain and her colleagues pursued the hypothesis that surface ice meltwaters may also have been capable of supporting early eukaryotic life at the time.

“There are many hypotheses for where life could have survived and sheltered during the Cryogenian, but we don’t have excellent analogs for all of them,” Husain notes. “Above-ice meltwater ponds occur on Earth today and are accessible, giving us the opportunity to really focus in on the eukaryotes which live in these environments.”

Small pond, big life

For their new study, the researchers analyzed samples taken from meltwater ponds in Antarctica. In 2018, Summons and colleagues from New Zealand traveled to a region of the McMurdo Ice Shelf in East Antarctica, known to host small ponds of melted ice, each just a few feet deep and a few meters wide. There, water freezes all the way to the seafloor, in the process trapping dark-colored sediments and marine organisms. Wind-driven loss of ice from the surface creates a sort of conveyer belt that brings this trapped debris to the surface over time, where it absorbs the sun’s warmth, causing ice to melt, while surrounding debris-free ice reflects incoming sunlight, resulting in the formation of shallow meltwater ponds.

The bottom of each pond is lined with mats of microbes that have built up over years to form layers of sticky cellular communities.

“These mats can be a few centimeters thick, colorful, and they can be very clearly layered,” Husain says.

These microbial mats are made up of cyanobacteria, prokaryotic, single-celled photosynthetic organisms that lack a cell nucleus or other organelles. While these ancient microbes are known to survive within some of the the harshest environments on Earth including meltwater ponds, the researchers wanted to know whether eukaryotes — complex organisms that evolved a cell nucleus and other membrane bound organelles — could also weather similarly challenging circumstances. Answering this question would take more than a microscope, as the defining characteristics of the microscopic eukaryotes present among the microbial mats are too subtle to distinguish by eye.

To characterize the eukaryotes, the team analyzed the mats for specific lipids they make called sterols, as well as genetic components called ribosomal ribonucleic acid (rRNA), both of which can be used to identify organisms with varying degrees of specificity. These two independent sets of analyses provided complementary fingerprints for certain eukaryotic groups. As part of the team’s lipid research, they found many sterols and rRNA genes closely associated with specific types of algae, protists, and microscopic animals among the microbial mats. The researchers were able to assess the types and relative abundance of lipids and rRNA genes from pond to pond, and found the ponds hosted a surprising diversity of eukaryotic life.

“No two ponds were alike,” Husain says. “There are repeating casts of characters, but they’re present in different abundances. And we found diverse assemblages of eukaryotes from all the major groups in all the ponds studied. These eukaryotes are the descendants of the eukaryotes that survived the Snowball Earth. This really highlights that meltwater ponds during Snowball Earth could have served as above-ice oases that nurtured the eukaryotic life that enabled the diversification and proliferation of complex life — including us — later on.”

This research was supported, in part, by the NASA Exobiology Program, the Simons Collaboration on the Origins of Life, and a MISTI grant from MIT-New Zealand.

MIT has again been named the world’s top university by the QS World University Rankings, which were announced today. This is the 14th year in a row MIT has received this distinction.

The full 2026 edition of the rankings — published by Quacquarelli Symonds, an organization specializing in education and study abroad — can be found at TopUniversities.com. The QS rankings are based on factors including academic reputation, employer reputation, citations per faculty, student-to-faculty ratio, proportion of international faculty, and proportion of international students.

MIT was also ranked the world’s top university in 11 of the subject areas ranked by QS, as announced in March of this year.

The Institute received a No. 1 ranking in the following QS subject areas: Chemical Engineering; Civil and Structural Engineering; Computer Science and Information Systems; Data Science and Artificial Intelligence; Electrical and Electronic Engineering; Linguistics; Materials Science; Mechanical, Aeronautical, and Manufacturing Engineering; Mathematics; Physics and Astronomy; and Statistics and Operational Research.

MIT also placed second in seven subject areas: Accounting and Finance; Architecture/Built Environment; Biological Sciences; Business and Management Studies; Chemistry; Earth and Marine Sciences; and Economics and Econometrics.

Today's Supreme Court’s ruling in U.S. v. Skrmetti upholding bans on gender-affirming care for youth makes it clear: trans people are under attack. Threats to trans rights and healthcare are coming from legislatures, anti-trans bigots (both organized and not), apathetic bystanders, and more. Living under the most sophisticated surveillance apparatus in human history only makes things worse. While the dangers are very much tangible and immediate, the risks posed by technology can amplify them in insidious ways. Here is a non-exhaustive overview of concerns, a broad-sweeping threat model, and some recommended strategies that you can take to keep yourself and your loved ones safe.

Dangers for Trans Youth

Trans kids experience an inhumane amount of cruelty and assault. Much of today’s anti-trans legislation is aimed specifically at making life harder for transgender youth, across all aspects of life. For this reason, we have highlighted several of the unique threats facing transgender youth.

School Monitoring Software

Most school-issued devices are root-kitted with surveillance spyware known as student-monitoring software. The purveyors of these technologies have been widely criticized for posing significant risks to marginalized children, particularly LGBTQ+ students. We ran our own investigation on the dangers posed by these technologies with a project called Red Flag Machine. Our findings showed that a significant portion of the times students’ online behavior was flagged as “inappropriate” was when they were researching LGBTQ+ topics such as queer history, sexual education, psychology, and medicine. When a device with this software flags such activity it often leads to students being placed in direct contact with school administrators or even law enforcement. As I wrote 3 years ago, this creates a persistent and uniquely dangerous situation for students living in areas with regressive laws around LGBTQ+ life or unsafe home environments.

The risks posed by technology can amplify threats in insidious ways

Unfortunately, because of the invasive nature of these school-issued devices, we can’t recommend a safe way to research LGBTQ+ topics on them without risking school administrators finding out. If possible, consider compartmentalizing those searches to different devices, ones owned by you or a trusted friend, or devices found in an environment you trust, such as a public library.

Family Owned Devices

If you don’t own your phone, laptop, or other devices—such as if your parents or guardians are in control of them (e.g. they have access to unlock them or they exert control over the app stores you can access with them)— it’s safest to treat those devices as you would a school-issued device. This means you should not trust those devices for the most sensitive activities or searches that you want to keep especially private. While steps like deleting browser history and using hidden folders or photo albums can offer some safety, they aren’t sure-fire protections to prevent the adults in your life from accessing your sensitive information. When possible, try using a public library computer (outside of school) or borrow a trusted friend’s device with fewer restrictions. 

Dangers for Protestors

Pride demonstrations are once again returning to their roots as political protests. It’s important to treat them as such by locking down your devices and coming up with some safety plans in advance. We recommend reading our entire Surveillance Self-Defense guide on attending a protest, taking special care to implement strategies like disabling biometric unlock on your phone and documenting the protest without putting others at risk. If you’re attending the demonstration with others–which is strongly encouraged–consider setting up a Signal group chat and using strategies laid out in this blog post by Micah Lee.

Counter-protestors

There is a significant push from anti-trans bigots to make Pride month more dangerous for our community. An independent source has been tracking and mapping anti-trans organized groups who are specifically targeting Pride events. While the list is non-exhaustive, it does provide some insight into who these groups are and where they are active. If one of these groups is organizing in your area, it will be important to take extra precautions to keep yourself safe.

Data Brokers & Open-Source Intelligence

Data brokers pose a significant threat to everyone–and frankly, the entire industry deserves to be deleted out of existence. The dangers are even more pressing for people doing the vital work advocating for human rights of transgender people. If you’re a doctor, an activist, or a supportive family member of a transgender person, you are at risk of your own personal information being weaponized against you. Anti-trans bigots and their supporters online will routinely access open-source intelligence and data broker records to cause harm.

You can reduce some of these risks by opting out from data brokers. It’s not a cure-all (the entire dissolution of the data broker industry is the only solution), but it’s a meaningful step. The DIY method has been found most effective, though there are services to automate the process if you would rather save yourself the time and energy. For the DIY approach, we recommend using Yael Grauer’s Big Ass Data-Broker Opt Out List.

Legality is likely to continue to shift

It’s also important to look into other publicly accessible information that may be out there, including voter registration records, medical licensing information, property sales records, and more. Some of these can be obfuscated through mechanisms like “address confidentiality programs.” These protections vary state-by-state, so we recommend checking your local laws and protections.

Medical Data

In recent years, legislatures across the country have moved to restrict access to and ban transgender healthcare. Legality is likely to continue to shift, especially after the Supreme Court’s green light today in Skrmetti. Many of the concerns around criminalization of transgender healthcare overlap with those surrounding abortion access –issues that are deeply connected and not mutually exclusive. The Surveillance Self-Defense playlist for the abortion access movement is a great place to start when thinking through these risks, particularly the guides on mobile phone location tracking, making a security plan, and communicating with others. While some of this overlaps with the previously linked protest safety guides, that redundancy only underscores the importance.

Unfortunately, much of the data about your medical history and care is out of your hands. While some medical practitioners may have some flexibility over how your records reflect your trans identity, certain aspects like diagnostic codes and pharmaceutical data for hormone therapy or surgery are often more rigid and difficult to obscure. As a patient, it’s important to consult with your medical provider about this information. Consider opening up a dialogue with them about what information needs to be documented, versus what could be obfuscated, and how you can plan ahead in the event that this type of care is further outlawed or deemed criminal.

Account Safety Locking Down Social Media Accounts

It’s a good idea for everyone to review the privacy and security settings on their social media accounts. But given the extreme amount of anti-trans hate online (sometimes emboldened by the very platforms themselves), this is a necessary step for trans people online. To start, check out the Surveillance Self-Defense guide on social media account safety. 

We can’t let the threats posed by technology diminish our humanity and our liberation.

In addition to reviewing your account settings, you may want to think carefully about what information you choose to share online. While visibility of queerness and humanity is a powerful tool for destigmatizing our existence, only you can decide if the risk involved with sharing your face, your name, and your life outweigh the benefit of showing others that no matter what happens, trans people exist. There’s no single right answer—only what’s right for you.

Keep in mind also that LGBTQ expression is at significantly greater risk of censorship by these platforms. There is little individuals can do to fully evade or protect against this, underscoring the importance of advocacy and platform accountability.

Dating Apps

Dating apps also pose a unique set of risks for transgender people. Intimate partner violence for transgender people is at a staggeringly high rate compared to cisgender people–meaning we must take special care to protect ourselves. This guide on LGBTQ dating app safety is worth reading, but here’s the TLDR: always designate a friend as your safety contact before and after meeting anyone new, meet in public first, and be mindful of how you share photos with others on dating apps.

Safety and Liberation Are Collective Efforts

While bodily autonomy is under attack from multiple fronts, it’s crucial that we band together to share strategies of resistance. Digital privacy and security must be considered when it comes to holistic security and safety. Don’t let technology become the tool that enables violence or restricts the self-determination we all deserve.

Trans people have always existed. Trans people will continue to exist despite the state’s efforts to eradicate us. Digital privacy and security are just one aspect of our collective safety. We can’t let the threats posed by technology diminish our humanity and our liberation. Stay informed. Fight back. We keep each other safe.