Ashley Boyd: Hi, there.

Audrey Tang: Hello, there.

Ashley Boyd: Hello.

Audrey Tang: Hey, I can hear you just fine. Can you hear me?

Ashley Boyd: Yes, I can. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: Great. Finally.

Ashley Boyd: Finally. I’m so sorry.

Audrey Tang: It’s just fine.

Ashley Boyd: Apologies for so many tries on my part.

Audrey Tang: It’s all good.

Ashley Boyd: I was just re-watching your MozFest speech. I came in and then someone pulled me away while I was there, so I wanted to see more of it one time. [laughs] It’s quite good. How was that experience for you?

Audrey Tang: It’s really smooth, and the engineers there, they fixed everything, and they were kind enough to have the live stream so that I can adjust the angles to watch the facilitator, and so on. It’s working pretty well.

Audrey Tang: That’s actually the inspiration of us making something like that for our social enterprise summit for foreign speakers. It’s social innovation right there.

Ashley Boyd: Social innovation and environmental stewardship. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: Reducing carbon footprint, and all that. [laughs]

Ashley Boyd: Exactly. I think the speaker loses some of that in-person connection, but it’s a good way to share ideas and the question platform is fascinating and really amazing.

Ashley Boyd: It was so interesting to have the opportunity to talk to you because in my previous life, I actually did large-scale public participation/public policy issues, using technology, but in similar ways, but more voting technology, but discussion. It was primarily a discussion-based...

Ashley Boyd: My previous boss Caroline Lukensmeyer is an innovator in that field within the US. She is now the Executive Director of the National Institute for Civil Discourse. I can share her work with you.

Ashley Boyd: Her stuff might be interesting.

Ashley Boyd: She’s working with state legislators now and doing intensive connections about what they care about very early on in their career, because our national politics is so divided that she’s trying to create an imprint experience early in their career that they can have shared values with others.

Ashley Boyd: They make legislative priorities and try to change things, but it’s more the personal experience that she’s trying to change. They’ve done it in a number of states, as pilots, in the US.

Audrey Tang: I heard of something like that in the Personal Democracy Forum last year. The "Cultivate the Karass" project did bring some young thought leaders and also early politicians, early in their career, from all across the aisle to some faraway place, and brainstorm for three days.

Ashley Boyd: That’s it. That’s her process.

Ashley Boyd: It’s to say that I have a very long interest in the broader work that you’re doing. I’m excited about your leadership and your work for lots of reasons.

Audrey Tang: In my position there’s things and more experiments that we can do, like using the open government process for social innovation and with social enterprise practitioners, like we do teleconferencing with 12 different ministries every other week, and I tour around Taiwan, and things like that.

Audrey Tang: There are also things I’m prohibited to do. For example, saying anything about the US FCC. That would be your work, then.

Ashley Boyd: Yes, I wish I was banned from saying anything. It would make me a lot less busy. Yes, that’s the whole job, and more. That’s interesting.

Ashley Boyd: Within the technology sphere, I’m new to the technology field. I worked more on other public interest issues.

Ashley Boyd: The concept of working open was not one that had really permeated my consciousness, although it was true for my practice, in terms of some of the work that I was doing. Thinking about infusing that at all levels of work, including in the government, is very interesting to me.

Audrey Tang: So many people ask me whether being radically transparent and being privacy conscious is at odds with each other, but they actually compliment with each other, because there’s the radically transparent part.

Audrey Tang: Everything else is secure, is private, and is built on the promise that you know the cyber security is there to prove which side is which, instead of having any grey area in between.

Ashley Boyd: It also provokes the important question among leaders, in particular, which is, if they want to keep something private, why. [laughs] There’s some things that truly need to be private, and some things that are power related that feel like they need to be private, but actually would change the dynamics for them not to be.

Audrey Tang: The cross-party negotiation, our parliament, it used be off the record, but now it’s live streamed. It’s like one end to the other.

Audrey Tang: The rallying cry between the before and now is basically that anything binding needs to be on the record. We don’t care how many off-the-record negotiations they had before the round, but because the round itself is binding, it needs to be on public record.

Ashley Boyd: Very interesting. What about Mozilla’s work would you like to know a little bit more about, since we have the opportunity to chat one-on-one? I don’t know who else you’ve been in contact with.

Audrey Tang: Actually, during MozFest I suggested that we have this talk to foster the public awareness on privacy. That was the theme this conversation is entitled.

Audrey Tang: I don’t really know how precisely you would like to introduce this, because the Mozilla corporation so far, in Taiwan, is less focused on the privacy advocacy theme, and more on developing the Firefox OS before. Now I don’t know what. I hear that here’s been shrinking a little bit.

Audrey Tang: The Mozilla community here is, of course, very vocal on policy, and so on, in issues. We always keep a very friendly approach.

Audrey Tang: The g0v movement has this open culture foundation as this legal entity. They literally share the same floor, same building with the Moz.tw. We naturally have a lot of affinity.

Ashley Boyd: That’s great. I can tell you a little bit about where we’ve been since I’ve joined and where we’re headed for the year. Maybe that might spark.

Ashley Boyd: Actually, that’s really great to know, about the Taiwanese community. I’m learning where Mozilla is strong, not just with staff, but community.

Ashley Boyd: I’m not surprised, but that’s lovely to hear, because it does allow us to do some work. It builds our strength and it gives us a resource to work together, both ways.

Ashley Boyd: We started working with the Indian Mozilla community, actually, on privacy. They do privacy events. We’re providing some materials that we’re working on, and they’re sharing theirs. It’s really lovely.

Ashley Boyd: When I joined Mozilla last January I was new to the issues. Super excited for me to have a corporation that’s connected because I’ve never had a product that would instill and try to be the flagship for values. That was really interesting.

Ashley Boyd: I mostly consider myself a consumer advocate, now that I think about it. I’ve worked on consumer issues, like healthcare reform, but also on women’s issues, issues of fair pay for women, paid family leave, and those sort of things for family work. Very deep variety of background.

Ashley Boyd: One of the things that I was given as a charge was to work on privacy and security. It was hard for all of us, not just me, but even the staff who’d worked to figure out how to tackle such a large issue.

Ashley Boyd: One thing that I noticed is that Mozilla has focused a lot on giving consumers tools that they can use. We were telling people to install Tor and to use Signal. Lovely tools, but one that are very hard for people to use and very lacking in the general understanding of them, of course. Also, it didn’t feel like they were the lowest common denominator for many people.

Ashley Boyd: We’ve always thought that giving people education about what they can do would then spur change, but the marketplace is so out of sync, in terms of options for consumers. We started to look at what we can do to change that.

Ashley Boyd: From my experience working on tobacco control issues, so fighting the tobacco companies, one of the pivotal changes in the mid-’90s was moving from stopping each individual from smoking, to looking more closely at the business model.

Ashley Boyd: The tobacco companies hook you early. They’ve got you for life. That’s the place to really look on a systems-level change. It felt to me that we needed to do some system-level change conversations in this space, rather than the individual intervention model.

Ashley Boyd: Also, people have so many devices now. For you to lock up each device [laughs] is very time consuming. No one has the time.

Ashley Boyd: We have started a process of looking more at privacy by design ideas, and how to really create a consumer conversation about what consumers care about and what they see in products, and point out the discrepancy between those and how products are made.

Ashley Boyd: Rather than making privacy and security settings difficult to find and master, or not have them at all, is put the responsibility back on the manufacturers to start changing their habits. We feel like there’s a dysfunctional conversation, where manufacturers say they don’t care about it, and so they don’t provide it, and then people aren’t aware of it.

Ashley Boyd: We stared to shift that conversation. We did a buyer’s guide on connected devices for the holiday season here, and used the "Consumer Reports" Digital Standard to look at those products the same way across different...It’s called "Privacy Not Included."

Ashley Boyd: That started the conversation there, and now we’re planning to look at some specific cohorts of products to register consumer concern about them, probably, particularly about connected toys for kids. There are some toys that have been banned in Germany and Canada but are still available in the US, Australia, and other places.

Ashley Boyd: Trying to amplify that conversation. Basically, try to foment a bit of a consumer revolution in this space, [laughs] just a tiny revolution, to popularize that conversation. That’s where we’re headed.

Ashley Boyd: We think that if we can start to amplify this conversation, we can change education among lawmakers and start to get some legislation and policies bubbling up, too. We think this is the way to get to that.

Ashley Boyd: At the core we’ve decided mostly to focus on data collection. The transparency related to data protection, choices within that.

Ashley Boyd: Separate we were struggling with the privacy and security frame a little bit. This is all about harvesting personal data without knowledge, or consent, and/or choices within that scheme. That felt like it freed us a little bit to get more to the heart of the economic model, which is really important to tackle these issues effectively.

Ashley Boyd: That’s where we’re headed.

Audrey Tang: It’s very impressive. As a daily user of Firefox Focus, both my Android phone and my iPad, [laughs] I think that that’s, compared to Tor and Signal, one of the things that’s easier to convince my friends to use. It doesn’t really need that network effect. It’s a convenience tool. That’s great.

Audrey Tang: The focus on data collection is one of the easiest way to convey the importance of privacy. Basically, people don’t generally realize that toys spy on them.

Audrey Tang: A wristband, of course it’s designed to record health things, numbers, digits, quantified self, and whatever. People buying that expect them to record something, but the toys and smart home accessories, people don’t generally expect them to do data collection without notice. That’s a really good angle to focus.

Audrey Tang: Because I also read the Electronic Frontier Foundation, also doing rating on communication software and other things that may or may not surveil on people and have their recommendations, is there a strategic synergy that you’ve worked out together, or are you working more or less independently?

Ashley Boyd: We have told them, in general, what we’re planning to do. Our goal is to not replicate. That’s why we want to use the Consumer Reports Digital Standard, not to take any wind out of their sails for doing that, because we think that rating products is exactly the kind of information, and companies.

Ashley Boyd: We’re trying to take a little bit more holistic look. Yes, we’re working in coordination.

Ashley Boyd: Actually, one of our ideas is to work to open campaigns so that we would share our public opinion polls, our focus group data, if we do that, some Keystone Resources, and then tell people what we’re doing and what we’re finding.

Ashley Boyd: In the public interest campaigning, actually, people hold their action rates and their list size very tightly. [laughs] It’s a different thing.

Ashley Boyd: Our goal is for other people to improve, hack, change the basic concept, all towards the common goal of amplifying this conversation about what’s happening with your data and what are the components of it.

Ashley Boyd: What Consumer Reports is doing and what EFF is doing is helping disrupt various spaces of it. Even disrupting the privacy policy space.

Ashley Boyd: We’re trying to look at different moments in time when there’s either a lack of transparency, or transparency where there’s lack of choice or no choice, or there’s a lack of options. Then sort of consciously disrupt that space.

Ashley Boyd: The first thing we’re doing is focusing on retailers and getting retailers nervous about...because the manufacturer has kind of blown people off a bit, so we’re trying to focus on their weakness, which is they’re dependent a lot on the retailers, on the distributors.

Ashley Boyd: If we can get them anxious in talking to the manufacturers, then we think we’ll have a more open conversation. Yes, designed to be a big effort, not just led by us, would be our goal.

Audrey Tang: That’s great. Let’s see.

Audrey Tang: I was just reading the survey results of how connected are you. Interestingly, or perhaps not surprisingly, that people put privacy kind of at the fifth priority, and even below security, which means there is a lot of work for work.

Ashley Boyd: Yes.

Audrey Tang: In addition to making this known, or releasing it as a permissive license for independent people to pick up and do data journalism, and whatnot, do you consciously work with bloggers or journalists, or whatever to turn this into stories, or you see yourself, primarily, as kind of a database that people can really use, but without a specific narrative?

Ashley Boyd: That’s really interesting. Do you mean stories about the issue and how they would use it, or...? I want to learn more, because I think you’re on to something, and I don’t think we’re doing that. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: Right, so for example -- I’m just mentally centering myself -- There’s a certain person called Edward Snowden [laughs] who revealed some materials that he encountered during his work.

Audrey Tang: It was not until it’s put into a journalistic narrative and dedicated media, like "The Intercept," for example, is set up to constantly turn out just bits, really, of the entire revelation or framed in a way that people can and do relate to, and always with the hint that there’s more, before it turned into a public discussion, worldwide.

Audrey Tang: In Taiwan, we already had that discussion in the early 2000s, due to the The Golden Shield effort, the great firewall. We had our Snowden moment years ago. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: It’s interesting to see that the world kind of waking up to the fact, and I think that the journalistic, especially investigative journalists, working on such communications, I think, really played a great role. That’s what I mean by having a trove of materials in addition, and then based on that, journalistic narrative.

Ashley Boyd: There is a similar trove of information that really pinched the dynamics in this tobacco debate, too, because they found the memos that really basically outlined their evil plan. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: Oh, really? Wow. [laughs]

Ashley Boyd: It was a really big part of the change in that moment, because it was like listening to themselves. It was separate from the polished PR machine, and it was their true selves and their true intentions were revealed. It actually formed the basis of the litigation. It was a big part, too.

Ashley Boyd: Your idea is really helpful. It connects to something that I’ve been thinking about, which is we have these fellowships. We have 30 fellows in Mozilla right now.

Ashley Boyd: The fellowships really serve two purposes. We’re sort of really trying to mine the full value for both the people and for us, that is to give people working on cutting-edge ideas within this Internet health movement, as we’re calling it.

Ashley Boyd: People working on consolidation, Web literacy, and net neutrality around the world, all different kinds of things, and giving them a place to hang their hat, get support, and really dig into the ideas, in a deeper way than they would if they had to scramble for a job.

Ashley Boyd: At the same time, also, help connect the staff with the cutting-edge ideas and issues that we need to know about and be connected to, to do our jobs well. I’ve been thinking what we need is a media fellow, actually journalists, who are eager to work in the public interest in a deeper way, and who want to take on the challenge of...

Ashley Boyd: I hadn’t been thinking of it through the investigative angle. That’s interesting. I was thinking more people who are gifted and who know about these issues and who are gifted, and breaking it down for the general public.

Ashley Boyd: We have a challenge in telling the story in a way that’s compelling and that people relate to. That’s one of my goals for this year is to establish some sort of media fellowship for that purpose.

Ashley Boyd: I also hear there are lots of journalists who are seeking refuge and escape from their profession because of all the stress. [laughs] We could help the community more broadly in that way.

Ashley Boyd: I think, especially, in places around the world, where we don’t have a staff base, it would be a way for us to learn more and share the stories of what are happening in some key places around the world in a deeper way than we would otherwise.

Ashley Boyd: I had not thought about it from that angle, but you’re connecting some thoughts I’ve had, separately, in a really helpful way.

Audrey Tang: It’s really interesting that your fellow is not location-based at all. It really speaks to the fact that Mozilla is a global-connected foundation.

Audrey Tang: Last year there’s two fellows in science, like Amal and Chris? I was just reading through the fellows list. There’s no minimum number of fellows? You just take the people who you think is...

Ashley Boyd: Now we have a bit of a mish-mash of fellows in a way that is lovely but we’re trying to figure out how to wrangle that, too, which is we’ve got some that are dedicated by issue or by professional dedication, like science.

Ashley Boyd: This year, we have a couple science fellows, a couple of media fellows, who are funded by the Open Society Foundation. Then we have a Ford open Web fellowship program cohort. They’re connected with host organizations.

Ashley Boyd: That’s actually designed more to create kind of a cohort of civic, tech, and public interest tech professionals, on both sides for non-profits to see the value and importance of that work and put it in their budgets, and also for the technologists to understand how they can have an impact.

Ashley Boyd: Then we started a cohort of tech policy fellows that are a bit more worldwide, so we have some fellows, one from Brazil, a fellow in East Africa, but there’s still actually those that are pretty North American, too.

Ashley Boyd: We are definitely struggling with our ambition to be more global, and trying to scale that in a way that works for both us and for the people we’re supporting, so they don’t feel like they’re on their own.

Audrey Tang: There’s no limits, really, with the kinds of fellow that you can have?

Ashley Boyd: Mm-mm. No.

Audrey Tang: Have you seen the screen?

Ashley Boyd: Yeah. It would be wonderful to have a Taiwanese fellow. I don’t know that we’ve had a Taiwanese fellow in the past.

Ashley Boyd: I am interested in what, as you said, a connecting with the community more and bridging that gap. We’re working in India on the Aadhaar biometric database, and we’re calling for a data protection bill that would secure user data within the system.

Ashley Boyd: We don’t like the system either, but since it has a 99 percent adoption rate among a billion people, [laughs] it would be a little challenging to overturn it.

Ashley Boyd: The community has been really active. There’s a widespread views on Aadhaar within the Indian Mozilla community, but there’s shared value in data protection, and so they’re using their privacy month activities to talk about Aadhaar. It’s a nice partnership and I’d love to do that more places.

Audrey Tang: It’s great. On the Mozilla discussion forum, the Mozilla discourse, there is quite a few communities basically hanging out there. I mean, people I know personally in the Taiwan community.

Audrey Tang: If there happens to be a press or journalist fellow, or the new round of civic-type fellow, yeah, I’ll be happy to disburse it to the existing Taiwan community.

Audrey Tang: There’s a lot of interest in Web VR, lately, but assembly, and so on. Many journalists that I know just use them as journalistic tools.

Audrey Tang: They use these new Web-based technologies to interactively show, for example, the rock climbing and the mountains, and anything that’s really interactive, and that really needs engagement goes with it the two-dimensional screen and with three-dimensional headsets.

Audrey Tang: Because Taiwan is really a place with, I think, one of the highest place of Internet penetration, so it actually reaches people without...We don’t have to worry that much about additional divide. That’s what I was trying to say. There’s a lot of cutting edge experiments in interactive storytelling, also.

Audrey Tang: That’s another thing we can connect the community to, like how much feeling can one summon for people to actually care about these privacy-related advocacy issues in addition to just words and pictures.

Ashley Boyd: Absolutely.

Ashley Boyd: Unfortunately, I have to go shortly, because I have a meeting here.

Audrey Tang: No, that’s fine.

Ashley Boyd: I’m curious if I can lean on your expertise and your great thinking for a moment more. Are there interventions that you see now in your governmental role that you think could be really effective in raising the privacy conversation from a policymaker?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, very much so, because Taiwan is, I think, the only country with a privacy law, but without a data protection authority in the world at the moment.

Ashley Boyd: Huh.

Audrey Tang: We are early in our process in setting up a data protection authority, whereas before, each ministry is its own DPA. We have like 30 or more DPAs.

Audrey Tang: That actually creates a general confusion and apathy, I would say, about privacy issues, because there’s really no central national body to communicate these issues, and make interpretations, administrative help, and guidance as other places. Japan was on the same boat, but last year they established their own DPA.

Audrey Tang: We run a consultation reaching to, I think, thousands of people, and more than 90 percent of people -- the number was just in yesterday -- are strongly in favor of having a DPA. We are now establishing a DPA.

Audrey Tang: This only happens once, so we try to maximize its impact...

Audrey Tang: ...and have general consultations and have dialogs, because it really takes the parliaments and close partisan support for any new organization added to the administration, and so it will be a huge dialog about data protection and privacy in the general population in the coming year.

Audrey Tang: We plan on maximizing that. How exactly, I don’t really know. [laughs] I have to talk with the vTaiwan community in the Gov Zero Movement. If most of our community wants to be part of the conversation it would be great.

Audrey Tang: Because when we did the policy stuff on the Uber, policymaking, the top-consensus, very innovative thinking of having the taxi companies adopting the same rating system, that was proposed by one of the coordinators in the Mozilla Taiwan Community. The answer came from Irvin.

Ashley Boyd: Wow, perfect.

Audrey Tang: He’s totally not a policy or a transport person, which is I think why...

Ashley Boyd: [laughs] That’s sometimes what it takes.

Audrey Tang: Right...why he’s able to think outside of the box. [laughs] I think there’s a lot of synergies, and I’m happy to follow up on emails or if you can participate in one of our events, I will be happy to talk in person, also.

Ashley Boyd: That’s great to know. It seems like in designing something like that, it’s the technology, plus the psychology, and the sociology, and you need people...It’s such a multidimensional...So often, people think about it only as a technology issue.

Ashley Boyd: Like you said, some of the best ideas come from people who are not experts in that field, but who can cut through what’s needed to give that sense of connection and security. Interesting. All right.

Audrey Tang: All right, so happy to see you, virtually. I think I’ll follow up with email, with a couple links, and we’ll see what we can do together.

Ashley Boyd: Perfect. I really appreciate your time and patience. It’s lovely to connect, and hope we can keep a conversation going over time at mutually beneficial time zones. Thanks for taking some of your evening time to talk with me.

Audrey Tang: All right, awesome, so I’ll be making a transcript of this conversation, and having you edit it before publishing it, or if you don’t mind, I can just upload the whole thing on YouTube. Your call.

Ashley Boyd: [laughs] OK. No, that’s fine. Either way. I’m open.