Hi, my name is Philipp Winter, I’m an Internet data scientist at CAIDA, which is a research center at UC San Diego.
In my past research I have dealt with or thought about a system that is called "snowflake".
The idea is to aid people who are subject to Internet censorship.
The concept of the system is to turn normal Internet users into
circumvention proxies without them knowing that they are doing this.
So imagine you are going to a website, a news site for example you frequently visit
visit and this news site automatically turns you into a circumvention proxy.
What then happens is in the background there’s another system that automatically reroutes
people who are affected by censorship over your laptop to the free Internet.
I think I would argue that most people think that this is a laudable cause, this is something that is worth supporting,
but the issue is that all of this is happening without these people who serve as proxies knowing what they are doing.
This system was originally was based on an opt-out model,
meaning that people had to explicitly say "I do not want to be part of this".
After a careful thought however the designers decided that it was probably better to inverse the model
into an opt-in model, because people may be upset about learning after the fact that they were part of this.
To prevent this harm from being done it may be better for people to explicitly say "I do want to be part of this".