Guardian Project: Getting to Know their Work Creating Easy-to-Use, Secure and Open Source Apps for Mobile Devices
The Community Series features stories of the people and projects behind the digital rights community.
Fabiola Maurice, Guardian Project’s community manager
Guardian Project creates easy-to-use secure mobile tech apps, open-source software libraries, and other tools and services that are widely used by average citizens looking to secure their rights to activists, journalists, and humanitarian organizations from around the world aiming to safeguard their work. Notably, this also includes indigenous communities in Latin America. Popular tools include, among others, Orbot, Butter Box, Clean Insights, with Orbot having over 10 million downloads on Android.
However, their popularity is not by chance. Guardian was started as a result of personal experiences that impacted the founders, which led to the development of tools made with both heart and top tier technical skills. We talked with Fabiola Maurice, Guardian Project’s community manager, to learn more about their celebrated, user-focused approach to development, which has also translated to a strong and vibrant Guardian community that spans demographics and languages.
How Guardian Project Started
The Guardian Project was started in 2009 by Nathan Freitas. In a 2011 TechPresident article, he explained that the founders were motivated by personal experiences that had deeply impacted them. For Freitas, a milestone moment was learning about the risks associated with proprietary software: the advanced security software that the company he was working for had spent years developing was mothballed when they were purchased by another company. This experience solidified his understanding of why open-source software matters.
The Guardian Project team
Another critical moment was during the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing. Freitas, a long-time Tibet activist, had worked to send a team of people to cover the event. He notes that he tried to get to China himself, but his visa was denied and told by Chinese authorities not to try again. One of the activists went missing for four days. Freitas shared in the article "It was the worst day of my life… I'd given them the technology. I'd given them incriminating evidence in the form of Twitter messages left on their phones." That incident also prompted him to think through ways that technology could be configured, such as authorized location tracking for that specific situation.
These two experiences made the necessity of the Guardian Project clear, and changes in the tech world were providing tools through the open-source movement.
“We are people from different parts of the world, different ages, professional backgrounds, but all of us have a similar ideology related to helping people at-risk by creating new technologies for their needs.”
Guardian’s Popular and Impactful Open Source Tools
Guardian Project’s tools push the boundaries of mobile and privacy technologies and are created to give people a voice, enhance their safety, ensure authenticity, and provide access to knowledge regardless of location or connectivity. They believe in free software, open source, end to end encryption, ethical tech, and codesign. Because of that, all the source code of the Guardian Project apps is available to the public for anyone to view, modify, and distribute. In fact, they encourage folks to audit, download, collaborate on, and make recommendations that can improve their tools. They have a Live Chatroom, a podcast, blogposts, and are open to questions or comments by email in any language at support@guardianproject.info. Fabiola, their community manager also provides her email for potential collaborations with partners or volunteers interested in testing Guardian’s apps: fabiola@guardianproject.info
Clean Insights - Helping Developers to Better Serve Their Users Without Spying on Them
For most companies, data collection is the default practice but it comes with toxic side effects. Conversely, however, stopping data collection can entirely deprive organizations of crucial insights. Their newest tool, Clean Insights gives developers an opportunity to plug into a secure, private measurement platform, to assist in answering key questions about app usage patterns, but without invasive surveillance of all user habits. This is done by utilizing practical techniques, such as offering a “Toxic Asset Audit” to help developers identify and dispose of these negative assets through their full-proof, one-day, audit, and focusing on the following tenets:
Data minimization: only the minimum amount of usage and behavioral data should be gathered to answer a determined set of questions.
Source aggregation: Possibly identifying data should not be held in any part of the system longer than necessary, aggregated at the source at the earliest possible time.
Randomization: Remove the link between the data and the individual by introducing noise to the data, to be sufficiently uncertain to unlink from a specific individual.
Generalization: Dilute the attributes of data subjects by modifying the respective scale or order of magnitude (for example, a region rather than a city, a month rather than a week).
Transparency: Always get consent, and the scope of the data collection and algorithms used should be made publicly available and well explained.
To learn more about the project, review their specification and their project overview presentation.
Orbot, the Tor App VPN for Cell Phones, Currently with 10 Million Android Downloads
One of the Guardian Project’s most popular and used tools is Orbot, which is the Tor application for Android and iPhone, currently with 10 million downloads for Android. Orbot is a virtual private network (VPN), which forces the mobile applications on your phone to go through Tor so as to anonymize your data. Most importantly, however, Orbot allows you to keep apps unblocked! One of its privacy features is traffic privacy. This means that anyone monitoring you will not know what apps you are using and when. Also, since there is no central logging of your traffic or IP address, it protects your user history - neither your network operator or app servers can see your history.
Butter Box - Life Without Internet Made Smoother
Butter Box is used by communities around the world
Built on a Raspberry Pi, Butter Box is an ecosystem of physical and digital tools curated to provide services and access to information for people experiencing internet shutdowns, or with limited access to the internet for any host of reasons (financial, natural disaster, location, etc.). It allows nearby people to connect and have access to an offline, open-source app store, a local public chat with encrypted private rooms, an offline navigation system with curated local maps, and tailored information that can be shared using USB sticks connected to a community’s specific Butter Box. While the current reach and number of users that can connect at the same time is limited, they have been experimenting with different antennas and routers to increase capacity.
If you are interested in learning more about Butter Box work and experience, check the notes of this digital rights Town Hall, Glitter Meetup, where they were featured guests and explained its performance in detail.
Apps in Indigenous Languages: Developing from a Non-North Centric Context
Guardian Project presenting its tools localized at the Fair of Mayan Languages in Mexico
The Guardian Project has also translated some of their apps into several languages, including indigenous Latin American ones. Orbot has been translated to Aymara, Wayuu, Nasa Yuwe, Nahuatl, and Guambiano, and Butter Box in Wayuu, Nahuatl, and Guambiano. Fabiola shares:
“Our approach differs from most software developers in that we focus on our final users. We break away from the traditional model of developing with a north-centric context and testing with available north technologies. When we start a project or enter the second stage of development, our first step is to identify the populations and end users we want to work with, as they can vary across different regions.”
To accomplish this, they make an effort to visit the territory where the tool will be used at least once during each project to analyze both the context and the locally available technologies.
'We purchase local mobile phones, and when we are unable to visit in person, we have the devices sent to us by delivery. We examine the Internet situation in the area, including providers, costs, and the frequency of shutdowns or power outages, as well as battery usage. Then we develop based on this context, and all tests are conducted on these phones. This is the key to the apps’ success,” explains Fabiola.
The Future of Mobile Software Development in Digital Rights
The Guardian Project’s community manager emphasis that "mobile technologies have emerged as the primary tools in the Digital Rights space, primarily due to their affordability and crucial availability during critical moments. They provide essential access to information, facilitate communication, and offer a means to document events as they unfold.” Therefore, she stress out that “it is vital to develop secure, open-source, and user-friendly tools that complement the efforts of those working on the front lines, empowering them to navigate challenges and protect their rights effectively."