Anyone who uses apps that advertise end-to-end encrypted messaging applications such as Telegram, WhatsApp, and Signal! Our goal is to involve users at various levels of engagement on encrypted platforms: community organizers, community members, organizers, and independent users. It’s important to note that only individuals who are 18 years or older can participate. Due to United States regulation, residents of the regions Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Syria, Venezuela, Crimea region of Ukraine, Luhansk People’s Republic (LNR), and Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) can not participate in the study. 

Follow this link (click here) to take the survey to share your experience with end-to-end encrypted messaging platforms.

Before participating in the survey, access the full informed consent here.

Participating in this study will take you approximately 15 minutes. The consent form should take about 2 minutes to read, and the survey should take approximately 13 minutes.

No, we are not offering monetary compensation for participating in the study. Participation is voluntary. 

After completing the survey you’ll be directed to our project’s website, where you can review information about the project and return to the website regularly to check on the project’s progress. The webpage will provide updates on the project and any new developments and stories from people who have permitted us to share them.

You may fear social stigma or negative consequences if your involvement in the research becomes known. Therefore, we want to assure you that we will not request any personally identifiable information in the survey that could reveal your identity. Furthermore, the research team will review all the responses shared, and if data such as name, age, biological sex, or location are found, this information will be removed. If you allow us to share your responses, we will only share broad themes and no personal data, in order to mitigate any re-identification risk.
There is a potential for data breaches or leaks, which may pose a risk to your privacy. However, we have implemented security measures to prevent such breaches, including encrypting the collected data in a cloud storage system with end-to-end encryption.

Yes, you can revoke your submission anytime by exiting the survey.

Yes, your participation is confidential. You will not be asked to divulge any personally identifiable information, such as name, age, biological sex, or location, during the surveying process. We will review all responses for accidental submission of personally identifiable information before integrating them into the analysis and remove them if any are found.
Only the stories you choose to share publicly will be posted on the website, and we will ensure that no identifiable information is included.

Your questionnaire responses will be used exclusively for research purposes and accessed only by a small team of researchers working on this project. We will only share portions of your responses on our website if you provide explicit permission during the survey. You can allow or decline this for each question while fully participating in the study. Your responses will be stored securely until the publication of the study report; after this, we will delete this information.

No. You will not be asked to divulge any personally identifiable information, such as name, age, biological sex, or location, during the surveying process. We will review all responses for accidental submission of personally identifiable information before integrating them into the analysis and remove them if any are found. We won’t share your unique responses without your consent, but if you do give us permission to share a story, and we find it  includes accidental personally identifiable information, we will remove it before publication. This is to prevent any re-identification following the publishing of results. 

For participants seeking additional layers of security, our survey and website are accessible via Tor—a network that anonymizes your online activity. Although we cannot fully eliminate web-based fingerprinting, we ensure that no information about your browser or IP address is stored, and the survey doesn’t leave permanent cookies on your device.

Your raw response data will only be seen by a restricted and small team of researchers on this project. During the surveying process, you will not be asked to divulge any personally identifiable information, such as name, age, biological sex, or location. We will review all responses for accidental personally identifiable information before integrating them into the analysis and remove them if any are found. 

While we hope to share some of your stories on our website, we won’t share your responses without your consent. You can still participate in the study if you don’t consent to sharing your responses. In that case, we will only use your responses to identify common themes and not use verbatim quotes on the website or in any publications.

For participants seeking additional layers of security, our survey and website are accessible via Tor—a network that anonymizes your online activity. Although we cannot fully eliminate web-based fingerprinting, we ensure that no information about your browser or IP address is stored, and the survey doesn’t leave permanent cookies on your device. You can access LimeSurvey’s privacy terms here for more information about the platform where the survey is conducted.

Finally, we use a cloud data storage system with end-to-end encryption and encrypted storage to store all responses and increase security in the data management.

We would like to share unique testimonials on our website to foster a network of trust and mutual support—for example, you might see that you are not alone or that your bad experience wasn’t normal or okay. However, you can choose to keep your  unique story confidential. If you want some or all of your stories included in aggregate data only (in other words, we will never include them as quotes and only use them to help identify common themes) you will have the option to opt out at the end of each question if you wish to keep your testimony private.

We cannot guarantee its inclusion on the website; we will use some discretion when choosing which portions to publish publicly. A few of our selection criteria include comprehensive and detailed answers, clear, concise, well-articulated responses, and responses that are inclusive to a broader audience. We will not include testimonials that we believe could bring harm to you or other individuals. 

We are collecting stories of users’ experiences using end-to-end encrypted messaging platforms and any issues they have encountered employing them. For this, we developed an online survey that asks about your privacy concerns, experiences of privacy invasion, message removal or reporting instances, and opportunities to improve platforms that promise end-to-end encryption, such as WhatsApp, Telegram, and Signal.

With this information, we aim to identify threat models, learn to manage risks from technology, law, and map an agenda for future organizing and research.

An encrypted message exchange is a conversation between two or more people over an end-to-end encrypted messaging app. Here, messages are encrypted using keys known only to the participants in the conversation. End-to-end encryption is used to make the conversation confidential in the sense that only the authenticated participants in the conversation can access the messages. This includes messaging apps like WhatsApp, Telegram, Element and Signal.

Do you want to know more? Click here

We aim to redefine content regulation discussions on messaging apps that promise end-to-end encryption (like WhatsApp, Signal, and Telegram) by engaging group administrators, volunteer moderators, community organizers, technology company trust and safety teams, and users. By gathering authentic narratives from these groups, we aim to foster meaningful discussions with organizations that need to hear the community of users’ experiences, including technologists, scientists, and policymakers.

This study is developed by the Citizens and Technology Lab (CAT Lab) at Cornell University. CAT Lab focuses on online communities and uses participatory research methods to study the effects of technology on the public interest. 

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has given the Citizens and Technology Lab (CAT Lab) at Cornell University a multi-year grant to do groundbreaking work on encryption and community moderation at the intersection of computer science and social sciences. The National Science Foundation is an independent U.S. government agency supporting scientific, engineering, and mathematical research and education.

Participatory research involves community members in the research process, from defining the research questions to designing the methodology to collecting and analyzing data. Community engagement and local knowledge are critical to this research style. At CAT Lab, we use participatory methods to work directly with the public to answer questions about digital life, conduct research that makes a difference in people’s lives, advance scientific knowledge, and contribute to policy discussions.

Cornwall, A., & Jewkes, R. (1995). What is participatory research?. Social science & medicine, 41(12), 1667-1676

Wright, Lucas (2023, May). Practical Challenges of Participatory Research: A Discussion on Reciprocity, Collaboration, and Extraction. Citizens and Tech. https://citizensandtech.org/2023/05/practical-challenges-of-participatory-research-a-discussion-on-reciprocity-collaboration-and-extraction/

We believe in the importance of accurately reflecting the perspectives of diverse affected groups in our work. To achieve this goal, we actively collaborate with global organizations that focus on the safety and security of overlooked groups, such as human rights activists. By doing so, we strive to ensure that the voices of these communities are heard and taken into account in our research and projects.

By collecting the experiences of people not typically included in conversations about encrypted messaging apps, such as users and moderators, through a publicly distributed survey, we aim to gain a deeper understanding of these encrypted spaces on an authentic level. By sharing these stories, we look to redefine relevant constituencies and promote meaningful discussions about content moderation and privacy on these encrypted platforms among technologists, scientists, and policymakers.

We plan to share the main findings in a final report upon completing this research. We will send this report to policymakers, companies, and technology developers shaping the future of encrypted communications. You can receive the report by adding yourself to the mailing list by clicking here. You also have access to the study’s progressive progress in the Blog section of this website. In addition, we will publish the research results in academic journals and conferences.