Khoury News
Research that hits home: Leah Rosenbloom fights to balance privacy and activism online
Rare is the researcher who chooses not to publish their work. Instead, Leah Rosenbloom has a more direct mission — design adaptable digital privacy tools and put them directly in the hands of grassroots activists.
This story is part four of a six-part Khoury News series called “Research that hits home,” which showcases researchers who come from — or form close partnerships with — the communities they study. Previous installments covered research into queer online communities, user-friendly social media, and inclusive video game design.
Leah Rosenbloom found their interest in digital privacy as an 11th grader. Or, perhaps more accurately, it found them.
In 2010, Rosenbloom’s school district in Lower Merion, Pennsylvania, was caught using webcams on school-issued laptops to collect pictures of students in their homes — all without their knowledge or consent.
“It was one of the first instances of public coming-to-consciousness that this was a possibility,” said Rosenbloom, who covered the story for their high school paper. “The report came out with the extent and details of this surveillance, and it was extremely upsetting and traumatizing. We were the first generation, I think, to start putting stickers on our webcams.”
And now, as the internet and social media present both vast opportunity and serious threats to activists and organizers — the “safety/visibility tradeoff” — it poses a key question: Could modern tools help activists tailor the amount of risk they take on while pushing for change?
Rosenbloom thinks the answer may be yes.
A cryptography postdoctoral researcher in Northeastern’s SEALab with a background in grassroots organizing, Rosenbloom co-developed the new encrypted annotation system tigro, which aims to allow grassroots organizers to better tailor their approach to collective digital privacy — and maybe help the public have better online conversations in the process. It’s a product Rosenbloom created not only because of their interest in correcting institutional harms like what had happened at their high school, or in the technical ways that overreaching surveillance can be interrupted, but also because of the nearly two decades they have spent in grassroots organizing.
tigro’s logo
“Creating space for myself in academia means creating space for questions of collective privacy and security to be rigorously examined, sustainably,” they said. “At the same time, the value of soaking up context in a nonformal setting cannot be overstated. People have ways of knowing their communities that are so difficult to articulate and so deeply rooted.”
For example, organizing helped Rosenbloom understand that privacy and security are collective practices. Research and rights frameworks surrounding many modern privacy-preserving technologies focus on individual users, but because communication necessarily includes multiple parties, a conversation is only as secure as its least-protected member. That’s why Rosenbloom envisions a culture and tools that prioritize peoples’ ability to control when information about themselves is gathered and shared.
Consent around information-sharing informs another of Rosenbloom’s more unconventional research practices: frequently choosing not to publish their work.
“Publishing is very valuable for the academic community and to move advocacy in a particular direction; there’s a legitimizing force to publication. But community work … conversations with people, doing collective privacy workshops and trainings — those activities are a big driving force behind why I do research and where I get my ideas and questions,” Rosenbloom said. “My objective is to get information into the hands of the people who can most benefit from it, and it’s much more efficient to run trainings and disseminate information through organizing networks than through traditional publishing channels.”
Sometimes, though, publication can be a good way to get information and tools into the right hands. Rosenbloom and their fellow researchers Seny Kamara, Zachary Espiritu, Tarik Moataz, Amine Bahi, and John Wilkinson have chosen that route for tigro.
Tigro allows users to make encrypted comments and annotations on posts, events, and other online data that will be visible only to those people — and for as long as — the user chooses. For example, if an organization posts about an upcoming protest, tigro would allow activists to leave notes to one another on the post about organizers, risks, and safety measures without posting those sensitive details to the internet at large. Users can have a secure, private conversation, on their own terms, about a public item in a shared digital space.
“Cryptography is good at keeping information completely private, and social media is good at making everything public. But there are not many gradations in the middle,” Rosenbloom said. “When you come in from an epistemic justice lens — what do humans need, on human scales, for human organizing at the grassroots level — you come up with these technical tradeoffs and solutions that are more geared towards that.”
Although tigro was designed for activists with stringent privacy needs, the idea of individualized, private comment sections on public posts has broader appeal. Tigro annotations could organize thousands of public social media comments into private, focused conversations, or keep important information from getting drowned out in a massive group chat. This is a common feature of tools developed using epistemically just principles; by solving for a more extreme version of a problem that exists at the margins, researchers also make progress on less extreme and more common versions of the problem.
“One of the problems that tigro addresses … is context collapse,” Rosenbloom said, describing the feeling of many people all talking at equal volume at the same time and in the same channel. “This type of tool where people are allowed fine-grain control over what is shared, with whom, and in what time span, has a wider applicability.”
Rosenbloom is grateful to their Khoury College advisors and mentors, Michael Ann DeVito and Ada Lerner, and to their SEALab peers for creating an environment in which they can bring their whole self to their research. They encourage Northeastern to follow DeVito and Lerner’s example by explicitly supporting trans students and by limiting the school’s use of surveillance and policing technologies.
“Michael Ann, Ada, and all our lab mates have provided an environment where I can really be myself. I don’t have to censor myself, I can speak my mind,” Rosenbloom said. “Everyone really makes an effort to see one another as whole human beings, to invite and welcome and affirm one another, which I think is beautiful and needed in a work environment.”
Rosenbloom looks forward to further exploring the balance of security and publicity in activism and to growing the cryptography and digital privacy community at Khoury College. They encouraged students curious about researching their own communities to sign up for their course “Abolition Technology” in the spring of 2026 or to simply stop by the SEALab for a chat.
“We need a lot more people doing work to reach towards these notions of epistemic justice and autonomy, and many, many more voices represented,” they said.
The Khoury Network: Be in the know
Subscribe now to our monthly newsletter for the latest stories and achievements of our students and faculty