Cyber Collective

Cyber Collective is a community-centered research organization that hosts events to teach and understand the ways data and privacy impact consumers. We educate the public in order to center marginalized voices in the data ethics dialogue, assess their knowledge, and then gather their input to influence change. We share our findings to educate, empower, and impact policy.

We are Cyber Collective, a group of technology professionals with backgrounds in cyber security, privacy, public policy, and ethics. Through our collective industry, academic, and lived experience, we have become intimately aware of the ways in which technologies deployed in today’s landscape have produced, and continue to produce, unintended harmful consequences at scale for the vulnerable and marginalized in society.

To learn more about our team, head to our Youtube channel where you’ll find videos of each team member, and learn what empowers them to do impactful work.

We cultivate safe learning spaces where our attendees can show up as their whole selves and open dialogue to investigate the way human life and technology are interconnected. We educate the curious-minded, assess their knowledge of the information learned, and then gather the live insights to advocate for change in industry and policy.

Specifically, we use the grounded theory approach in our creative, qualitative research, to center marginalized folks—those who have historically been pushed to the margins by decision-makers in tech product and policy development—in conversations to impact the next generation of tech product and policy.

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We believe privacy is a constitutional right. That’s why we’ve started a petition advocating for a Federal Privacy Legislation to put consumer data protection first. We’ve partnered with The Markup and Elroi plus tons of other organizations and activist groups in a joint open letter calling to action.

We’re calling on policymakers, activists, data analytics experts, social scientists, app developers, diverse group of individuals that represent the present-day technology and digital landscape to effectively develop privacy legislation that covers all ground, from varying industry perspective and domain expertise.

You’re not only investing in the first and only WOC owned Security + privacy research firm, but you’re investing in the health and future of the digital ecosystem and our constitutional right to privacy.

Monetization strategies around research are delicate and take time. Our intention with this funding is to expand the work we are currently doing: hosting creative research events to educate our community, assess their knowledge, then use their insights to influence policy and industry. We will also deliberately determine how we can ethically bring our research to market, under the guidance of domain experts, so that we can effect meaningful change. 

Our total annual spend is broken down into the following: 

• Research: 48.7%. As we expand the reach of our work, we need to work with domain experts, like policy writers and privacy attorneys, to make sure we are tackling problems effectively and comprehensively. We also need to work with folks who can help us conduct the research itself, by gathering, coding, and interpreting the data we collect from events. 
• Marketing: 43.8%. Getting the word out to community members about our work is just as important as doing the work itself--only when we’ve reached a wide audience can we effect real change that truly responds to the needs of the marginalized. We use marketing automation software, as well as the services of a PR firm and video editor. 
• Operations: 7.5%. Business owners know! We have standard operating costs to cover, like legal fees to incorporate, and subscriptions to email, file storage, website hosting, and webcasting software.