Redefining online community part 9: addressing online safety, security, and privacy.

Author Cal Loo is a serial social entrepreneur, the founder and executive director of a nonprofit company, a self-professed techie at heart, a 30-year tech consultant, and an ordained ceremonialist. He has been blogging about living more intentionally and navigating major life transitions since 2015. In this ninth piece in a ten-part series Cal explores the concepts of online safety, security and privacy. In the final post he’ll close the series by introducing the Eos Community Connections Portal – an online community connections portal unlike any other.

Online safety - a complex concept to define and a challenging one to deliver.
The internet is an amazing place, but it can also be an unforgiving, hostile place. While it’s great to stay connected with friends on social media, get the most recent news updates anytime/anywhere, and use your smartphone to find virtually anything you want, there are many downsides.  Toxic content, rude interactions, bullying, gambling and addictions are all realities in the online space, and in extreme cases they can lead to threats of physical danger and violence that end up in the headlines - as in the example mentioned in this 2018 Washington Post article by Rachel Hatzipanagos. The reality of these experiences can be harmful to the mental health and emotional well-being of participants, and as I mentioned in part 2 of this series, many people are ditching their social media accounts because of it. If you’re going to be online - and most people are in some shape or form - then you need to take steps to protect yourself from the bad stuff.  Esmée Telman’s April 2022 Mashable article gives five practical tips for staying safe online and it’s worth a quick read.  There’s a lot more to it of course, but this is at least a place to start.
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The fact that all this online yuck exists means that a “safe online community” like the one we’re building at The Intentional Living Collective needs to effectively and transparently protect its members from it. Actually, the very concept of safety - online and in person - is a challenging one to define, but it’s so vitally important that one of our core values at The Intentional Living Collective directly addresses it. Regarding safety we say “We are safe: We speak and act toward all members in ways that safeguard or protect them from harm or danger of all kinds - including physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual.” Saying it isn’t enough though - we also have policies and procedures in place to back it up.  Our approach starts with the fact that only registered members that have accepted our Good Human Code of Conduct can either post content in our platform or reply to posts by members. Our code of conduct is pretty simple and clearly defines eight shared-community values that add up to just being, well, good human beings towards each other.  Our transparent and fair content flagging and moderation policy and processes are explicitly designed to safeguard and protect members from experiencing unfriendly words and unsafe actions from anyone on our platform, and people that don’t live up to their agreement will lose their accounts. Importantly, our processes begin with facilitated member to member conflict resolution, and then adds layers of escalation support that ultimately ends up at a “Member Escalations Team,” made up of respected community members, for a final decision. 

The difference between feeling safe and feeling comfortable.
When it comes to online safety there’s an important difference between feeling unsafe and feeling uncomfortable. While it’s important to help people feel safe, it’s also important to not take things so far as to disallow or even discourage content or interactions that have good intentions but might push someone’s comfort zone a bit. In their book The Coddling of the American Mind, authors Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff do a great job of explaining that many in today’s society mistake feelings of discomfort for being unsafe, and how this can lead them to calling for the canceling of anything or anyone that pushes their boundaries. Sadly this can also result in an artificially sterile - but “safe” - interpersonal environment, and the loss of meaningful opportunities for important learning and growth. 
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I witnessed this first-hand in a men’s group meeting over a decade ago, and it’s something I keep in mind even now. I was active in the Mankind Project at the time and we were in a closed-circle, safe-space discussion about some challenging personal things that we were all working on at the time. One of the members was talking about the work he was doing to overcome toxic-male programming passed down through his father, describing how his father had called him a “pussy” for the way he handled a situation and told him that he needed to “man up!”  One of the newer members was listening to the story and raised his hand, calling “safety” - which is a way of saying that he didn’t feel safe in the situation. One of the more senior members recognized that hearing the story had triggered something inside the newer member, and calmly asked him what about hearing the story was an actual threat to his physical, mental, or emotional safety.  Upon thinking it through, the newer member realized that there was nothing in the room, in that moment, that could actually hurt him and so he could “safely” continue to be part of the conversation. Similarly, in online community space it takes some work sometimes to recognize which elements are truly unsafe and which ones are merely uncomfortable - and then to know how to deal with them appropriately.

Online security and privacy considerations 
According to Wikipedia, data security means protecting digital data, such as those in a database, from destructive forces and from the unwanted actions of unauthorized users,[1] such as a cyberattack or a data breach.  I could list endless examples of recent data breaches; it seems I’m constantly either reading stories about data getting stolen from a social media site, or hearing from my credit card company that my data had been stolen and I need to replace my card.  Because I don’t trust that my data is secure, I’m reasonably careful about how much of my data I put into my online profiles.  With that in mind, we’re designing the Eos Community Connections Portal to be highly secure, so our members can trust that their personal, private information stays private.  To ensure privacy, we started by committing that we would never sell our members’ information to anyone, and we decided that we wouldn’t host advertisers on our platform at all. To minimize security risks, we chose a platform host that offers sophisticated security features, and implemented them across our site. We have also developed solid data management practices to lock things down as much as possible.  While it isn’t possible to absolutely guarantee that data privacy or security incursions won’t happen, we can feel pretty good that we’re doing everything we can to prevent them and keep our members’ data safe.

​Coming up next: Bringing it all together with the Eos Community Connections Portal.