Alex Stamos

1. The Trust and Safety Crisis
or
Some hard-learned lessons
or
Let’s fail upwards, together

2. We ain’t doing so hot

3. We* ain’t doing so hot
*we == [techies, CS academics, nerds]

6. We have some fundamental problems

7. We are still in love with complexity

8. The Stamos
Hierarchy of the
Actual Bad Stuff that
Happens Online to
Real People
Abuse
InfoSec

9. InfoSec
Account Lifecycle/Passwords
Patching
Simple Config Errors
Old App Vulns
0-day
USENIX

10. Subpixels
{ Side-Channel
Attacks

11. We have no good model for the relationship
between individuals, governments and tech
companies

13. Fast
Cheap Correct

14. Anonymous
Surveillance
Resistant
Minimal
real-world
harm
Censorship
resistant
Trustworthy
information
Neutral
moderation
No data
leakage
Minimal data
collection
Harassment
free
Data is
portable
Free
Reliable

15. We are not proactively honest about the
downsides of what we build

17. We aren’t learning from our mistakes

23. Lessons from Yahoo v.
1. If you aren’t moving forward, you are drowning
2. Tech giants can be too responsive to Wall St.
3. IV in -> Phone Off

24. Scaling culture != Worshipping the past

28. What can we do?

29. The key to predicting harm is empathy
The key to empathy is team diversity

30. Shift risk ownership to those
who make the real decisions

31. Adjust incentives towards harm,
not complexity or headlines

32. Bring these lessons back to the classroom

33. The nerds inherited the earth
We gotta do better

34. Thank you
stamos@stanford.edu