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This week, comedian Rosie Tran tells you what goes inside your privacy notebook. It's not just for sharing your deepest, darkest secrets. Although you can totally use it for that, too. Privacy expert, BJ Mendelson, then interviews the founder and CEO of Block Party, Tracy Chou. If you're going to continue to use any social media platform, you're going to want to make sure you're also using Block Party. BJ and Tracy explain why. Get the full show notes and additional details at https://www.stupidsexyprivacy.com
Creators and Guests
Host
Rosie Tran
Rosie Tran is one of the fastest rising stars in the entertainment business! Originally from New Orleans, Louisiana, she moved to Hollywood to pursue her career as a professional entertainer. The stand up comedian, writer, podcast personality, and actress has toured internationally, at comedy clubs, colleges, and overseas for the USO in Europe and the Middle East.
Editor
Andrew
I am the Editor of all things on the Stupid Sexy Privacy Podcast.
What is Stupid Sexy Privacy?
Stupid Sexy Privacy is a miniseries about how to protect yourself from fascists and weirdos. Season 1 ran from 2022 to 2023. A revised version of Season 1 began airing in August of 2025. A second season will premier in 2026. Your host is comedian Rosie Tran, and the show is produced by author and information privacy expert B.J. Mendelson. Every episode is sponsored by our friends at DuckDuckGo. Tune in every Thursday night (or Friday morning if you're nasty) at 12 am EST to catch the next episode.
Rosie Tran: Welcome to another edition of Stupid Sexy Privacy, a podcast miniseries sponsored by our friends at DuckDuckGo. I'm your host, Rosie Tran. You may have seen me on Chime TV's A Brand New Yay or on season two of Peacock's Comedy InvAsian. Aside from organizing with your friends and neighbors, laughter is one of the best weapons we have to fight fascists and weirdos. So, if you need a good laugh, check out my episode of Comedy InvAsian, which is called The Hanoi Honey, after you're done listening to today's episode.
Clyde: Quack!
Andrew: He doesn't like self-promotion.
Rosie: I mean, Clyde is a duck. He doesn't like a lot of things. Hawks, the scent of lemon oil and people who try to give him bread.
Clyde: Quack!
Rosie: I'm not trying to give you bread.
Clyde: Quack! Quack!
Rosie: Andrew, can you inform this duck that if I don't tell our listeners who I am, that I'm just some random person on the internet? That means there's no human connection and they're not going to care about what we have to say. I might as well be an AI. And if that's the case …
Is he seriously looking at a stopwatch right now?
Andrew: Clyde's gotten super into time management.
Rosie: This is what happens when BJ gets depressed for like two years and puts a literal duck in charge of the show. *clears her throat.*
Speaking of BJ … Over the course of this series, we're going to offer you short, actionable tips to protect your data, your privacy and yourself from fascist and weirdos.
These tips were sourced by our fearless leader. (He really hates when we call him that.) BJ Mendelson. Episodes One through 24 were written a couple of years ago. We're re-airing them now because most of that advice still holds. Everything you hear after episode 24 is going to be brand new, including this introduction
Andrew: And anything we need to update from the original episodes can be found at StupidSexyPrivacy.com.
Rosie: That's right. So make sure you visit StupidSexyPrivacy.com and subscribe to the newsletter.
Now, for those of you who don't know, BJ is the author of the book “Privacy and How We Get It Back”, alongside Amanda King, who you'll also hear from in this series. BJ is writing a sequel called “How to Protect Yourself from Fascists and Weirdos.”
So.
Everything we're going to present comes from two actual humans who research and study the stuff for a living.
Clyde: Quack!
Rosie: OK, OK, two actual humans and one super intelligent duck. Although I don't know how intelligent that duck really is. Especially when he keeps forwarding Andrew and I emails with a subject line that says 1986’s Howard, the duck is good, actually.
Clyde: Quack!
It's a bad movie and you know it.
Andrew: Okay, I gotta separate these two. Remember to visit StupidSexyPrivacy.com and let's get to today's privacy tip.
Today’s Privacy Tip
Rosie: Did you get your privacy notebook? If not, go back and listen to our first episode. Then get yourself a privacy notebook. We're gonna use it a lot throughout this miniseries. This week's episode is a perfect example. That's because today we want you to make a list in your privacy notebook of all the internet connected devices that you own. This can include your router and modem, of course, but also your Amazon Echo device, your smart TV, and even your humidifier.
Yes, even your humidifier. If it's in your home and it connects to the internet, you want to keep track of it. Here's how we determine what goes in the privacy notebook offline and what goes into your 1Password or BitWarden account:
-If you access the service through your phone or laptop, you can put the passwords into your Password Manager.
There are exceptions, like for your Master Password, but almost everything else can go into 1Password or Bitwarden. But...
-If you own a device in your home that can also connect to the internet, those are the devices you want to document in your notebook for maximum security.
You're going to want those usernames and passwords offline.
Makes sense?
So, why do you want to keep track of these internet-enabled devices? They're easy to hack. That's really the bottom line here. And that's because most people just use the default username and password for those devices and then forget to update the software on a regular basis. So in your privacy notebook, we want you to come up with new, stronger passwords for all of your home devices.
And you also want to make a note of the last time you updated their software. We'll have more to say about Internet Connected Devices next week, but for right now we want to leave you with this actionable suggestion.
Set aside an hour on the last day of every month.
This is going to be your time to practice good privacy hygiene. One of the things you'll do on the day is to update the software on all of your home devices. You don't need to change the passwords unless one of those devices suffers a data breach.
Regular software updates is the easiest thing you can do to protect yourself from fascists and weirdos, but you have to make it a habit if you're going to succeed. That's why we suggest setting aside one hour, once a month, to update the software on your home's internet-connected devices.
Interview With Tracy Chou of Block Party (Part 1)
It's BJ Mendelson, and I'm popping in to update you on something pretty important. In the original episodes of Stupid Sexy Privacy, like the one you're listening to today, we ran excerpts from my book, Privacy and How We Get It Back, which was originally published in 2017.
At the time the original podcast series was published, which was back in October of 2022 and then running through 2023, a lot of what I said in that book held up. But in 2025, given the rising tide of fascism all over the world, there are definitely some sections I don't think hold up anymore.
And to paraphrase Abraham Lincoln, when you're wrong, you should say you're wrong and you should embrace the new facts eagerly and spread them enthusiastically. So, I definitely think that there are some places in the book where I was wrong. And then there are some places in the book where time has just demonstrated that I was wrong. So I accepted and acknowledged that. And I think that more people should proudly and happily admit when they're wrong. So I'd like to set that example. And what we're going to do is we're not going to air those parts of the book that ran in the original series. There's not too many of them, but episode two definitely had one where I was like, yeah, I don't feel pretty good about that. So we're going to cut it.
So what are going to do instead? Instead in their place, we're going to air some of the brand new interviews we've been recording. That brings us to part one of our interview with Tracy Chou. Tracy is the founder and CEO of Block Party, which builds anti-harassment tools to better protect your online safety and privacy. This is not an advertisement. This is not one of those like influencer affiliate deals. I personally have been a Block Party customer for some time, and we have a rule at Stupid Sexy Privacy, which is that we will only recommend products and services that we personally use ourselves. So, I highly recommend Block Party. And for that reason, I invited Tracy to speak with us. So, let's get to part one of our interview. And next week at the tail end of episode three, you'll hear the second half.
BJ Mendelson: Tracy, thank you so much for joining us today. I hope you might take a moment just to introduce yourself to our crowd.
Tracy Chou, Founder and CEO of Block Party: I'm Tracy. I am the founder and CEO of Blockparty and we build tools to help protect people's online presence from being weaponized against them.
BJ: Before we get too deep into that, because we've been recommending Block Party for a while now, I also understand that, you know, famously Block Party started as something different from what it is today. Initially it was built on top of Twitter's API before everyone's least favorite billionaire decided to purchase the platform and ruin it for everybody.
So one of things that you've said, that I really like, is that we shouldn't shy away from using social media platforms. But when it comes to Twitter specifically, and I won't call it X, like I refuse to call it X, we're recommending people delete it and not give that man any more of their time and attention. So before we get into anything else, just given how Block Party started, I was curious just about your feelings about Twitter today and should we, while maintaining our social media presence, abandon that one specifically?
Tracy: So I personally don't take such a strong stance that you should delete Twitter. I think that if you find utility in it, go ahead and keep using it. So consistent with my general stance of if you find value in something, like you should be able to use it. But if you are morally conflicted about being there and implicitly supporting a platform that you don't agree with, then of course you can dial back your usage or delete it and move on. I know there's some people who expect me to take a stronger stance given my history with the platform, but I think I have a more pragmatist, practical point of view. Having seen that purism rarely works, it's never really that clear. There's always more nuance and people have to make the choices that make sense for them. So for example, I still find value in being on Twitter even to observe what has changed, because it has changed very dramatically. A lot of key players in Silicon Valley still use it. So even if I don't… post on it anymore. I still check in quite often and see what people are saying, what's trending, even just like how the platform itself is working and seeing how Grok responds to things all the time when people ask it questions and it's a little crazy. So it is useful to just keep an eye on things in my use case. So that is my stance. Feel free to delete it if you don't like it, but I also won't judge anybody who keeps using it.
BJL I like that approach. I think it jives really well with this thing that you've said in a few different interviews and in a few different publications is that we shouldn't shrink away from using these platforms. Like if you have a voice, you should still be using it. so I really like that. I like the pragmatic approach. I mean, for me, it's more of a moral thing.
Tracy: Totally fair.
BJ: Yeah. Like, you know, I just, again, without getting into specifics, like I found Blue Sky to be a nice alternative and I'll leave it at that.
Tracy: Yeah, that's a great one.
BJ: Let me ask you, so I'm not sure how many people listening will be familiar with, with Project Include and the work that you've done to highlight what are absolutely flagrant disparities in terms of the hiring practices down in Silicon Valley. I know you've been an advocate of, of these issues for a long time, and I really appreciate that. I remember the Medium posts when it first came out. So as a longtime follower, I wanted to ask you for people who aren't familiar, if you could quickly walk us through your journey into starting Block Party.
Tracy: Sure, I started my career as a software engineer at Quora in the super, super early days. So I was the second engineer hired onto the team. And that was a very formative experience for me as it made me realize and really appreciate that all of these platforms are just built by people. In fact, we were creating one just that in there with like the handful of us that sat in that room coding it up. But it also made me realize how much these people are inflicting their own perspectives and biases into the product. So even when the site only had a couple of thousand users, I was dealing with somebody harassing me. It made me so angry that somebody was harassing me on the platform that I was helping to build. And I wanted to make that stop. So I felt so strongly about it. I proposed building the block button and my colleagues were like, fine, you feel very strongly about this, go ahead and build it. Like you're going to go do it.
I'm sure somebody would have built that eventually for Quora. It's like all platforms eventually have one, but I'm also quite sure that it was my presence there very early as a young female engineer that caused it to be prioritized so early.
Another example of how the people sitting in the room really impact what is prioritized and determine what's built: At one point we were discussing what the behavior of the home feed algorithm should be. So what you see when you log in and at a table od all male engineering colleagues, somebody turned to me and asked, Tracy, what do women want? As if I could represent the totality of more than half the world's population. Like, I don't know, I'm a new grad, I’ve a very limited worldview, I will do my best. It really struck me that that lack of diversity and representation on our team was severely impacting our ability to build good products that serve everyone. Not to mention the experience of going to work day to day in an environment that is very skewed in one way.
So those experiences early on got me to start talking to more people and writing about diversity. So, I was doing that for a couple of years, not trying to do anything with it in particular besides like put an opinion out there, but I… became a bit more known around DEI activism when a blog post that I wrote went viral. And this is when I was at Pinterest, it was a couple of years after I was at Quora. And the post was titled, “Where are the Numbers?” and it called out Silicon Valley's hypocrisy around being so data-driven about everything, except its demographics, having no data on diversity because if you have that data, then you have to confront the problem. And so this post ended up kicking off a bit of a movement around publishing diversity data and then once establishing that baseline made it really clear that there were problems that we needed to deal with and people outside the Valley could also see that there were truly problems. I think anybody who worked in tech companies in the Valley could just look around and see what the problem was but having that data out there really changed the game and made it so that it was something that we could talk about more publicly and outside the industry. that became sort of like a side hustle for me. While doing all the engineering work, I started doing the DEI work on the side. But what's funny and a little ironic, in some of these conversations about diversity, I'd use the example of Twitter and its very homogenous, early tech team, not anticipating how the platform might be used for things like abuse and harassment as a motivation for why diversity is really important. And then I ended up on the receiving end of this harassment because I was talking about it. And so that is how I ended up being inspired to start Block Party, which spoke out of the optimism of being an early builder of these platforms and believing in the good that they can enable.
I was a part of all those early conversations and thinking, what if all these people got on our platform and share this information and connect with people and think about how great it is that the internet has democratized all this information and access, like there's all that optimism about what good is possible. But then also there was the lived experience I had of dealing with some of the harms that these platforms have facilitated. And as an engineer and as a product person who's worked at these platforms, I knew that we could do better. So Block Party is my attempt to try to make it so that we can get all the good of the internet without the bad.
Ad Break
Amanda King: Hey everyone, this is Amanda King and I'm one of the co-hosts of Stupid Sexy Privacy. These days, I spend most of my time speaking to businesses and audiences about search engine optimization, but I do want to take a minute to tell you about a book I co-authored with BJ Mendelson. It's called How to Protect Yourself from Fascists and Weirdos, and the title tells you everything you need to know about what's inside. Now, thanks to our friends at DuckDuckGo, BJ and I are actually releasing this book for free in February 2026.
And if you want a DRM-free PDF copy, you can have one.
Or maybe you want a DRM-free MP3 of the new audiobook? You can have that too.
All you need to do is visit StupidSexyPrivacy.com and subscribe to our newsletter. Again, that website is StupidSexyPrivacy.com and we'll send you both the PDF and the MP3 as soon as they're ready.
Now, I gotta get out of here before Clyde shows up. He doesn't think SEO is still a thing and I don't have the time to argue with him … because I got a book to finish.
Interview With Tracy Chou
BJ Mendelson: And what I like is you've been inside some of these massive companies. So like you, you were an intern at Facebook, is that right?
Tracy Chou, CEO and Founder of Block Party: That’s right.
BJ: So intern at Facebook, worked at Quora, worked at Pinterest. So you're approaching these problems from the perspective of, you know, we talked to a lot of academics and, you know, I love talking to them, but sometimes they don't have that actual experience of being inside. Right? So they could say, yeah, it's up to the companies to fix it. But it's another thing for someone who's actually been inside to be like, okay, no this is a way to approach it. And that's something I really appreciate about Block Party is that it’s coming from that approach. Is there anything you want to highlight on that front? Just running a tech company and addressing these issues from more of an engineering background.
Tracy: Yeah, I think that insider perspective has been very valuable because it helped me to understand that a lot of the people at these companies care about doing good and they want to be good people and do things that are helpful for the world. But ultimately, the incentive structures may shift what emergent behavior you get from the companies and platforms. So having been at Pinterest, for example, when it was still pretty early, so I joined Pinterest when it was 10 people and left when it was about 1,000, I got to see its evolution and the development of things like the promotion process for engineers. And what are the things that individuals would do to elevate their personal careers?
And when you think about all of those very personal incentives, there's like the human side of, I just want to advance my career, but then that ties into the KPIs that the company is trying to drive on the business front, and what are they trying to achieve economically. All of those incentives can come together in a way that is not very user-friendly, not because the people who work at Facebook hate people, but because all the incentives push them to act in a certain way.
And so in starting Block Party, I was thinking very hard about that incentive alignment and thinking that there's only so much that can happen inside of a platform company that is monetized by advertising and engagement versus outside of one of those big platform companies. The way Block Party is situated, we don't make money by selling people's data. We sell functionality that helps people with their online experience. So, the alignment is much better around what we're trying to do and how the company is structured.
So like that sort of perspective, like how it actually works when you're inside of it. Like I know a lot of the people who work in these big platform companies and they're really nice people and they care, but that's not good enough. And that's why I think you're kind of alluding to this sometimes in talking to folks who haven't been inside the industry. There can be this feeling of like, we'll just write an open letter and tell them that bad things are happening and then surely their moral character will push them to want to fix these problems. Like, well, it's not quite that.
BJ: Right.
Tracy: But we have to look a little bit harder at capitalist incentives and how business outcomes kind of get propagated throughout organizations. I am hopeful that examining systems in such a way can lead to different types of solutions.
BJ: Absolutely. And yeah, it's not that one approach is better than the other. mean, like certainly on the academic front, know, one of the things we'll get to in this discussion is the concept that you can't fully automate your privacy.
Tracy: Yeah.
BJ: You know, you need something to offer you like more granular decisions. And then it's fascinating watching from the academic side, them making that suggestion. And then on the product side, watching Block Party actually offer the ability to make those granular decisions.
Let me ask you real quick, the mission at Block Party. Just speaking to that point of like, there's always good people inside these tech companies and it's important not to demonize the people that work for these companies. I remember when I wrote, Social Media Is Bullshit, right? People at Facebook were like, “You think we're all evil.” And I was like, no, I don't. really don't. I promise.
So it's important to talk about people and mission. And so I wanted to ask before we start getting into the specific technical features of Block Party, the mission is described as “a mission to make the world feel safe online.” And I was curious if you can tell us about how that's practiced internally. Because I feel like, I feel like that's important to hear. Like anytime we recommend a product or anyone recommends a product, it's sort of like all those ads you see for VPNs and YouTube commercials. Right. But the VPN is just as shady as what your ISP is doing.
So I think it's important to show that these companies actually walk the walk. And so I was curious to see if you can highlight how the mission to make the world feel safe online is sort of emphasized in what Block Party offers us.
Tracy: Yeah. I mean, in all of our conversations, we are thinking ultimately around what is that end user experience and what are the values we're trying to uphold for them. It is challenging at times. So one challenge in particular that comes up a lot is around trying to be privacy respecting and privacy forward, but also grow a business where growth always is going to trade off against a lot of other priorities and values. And so we've had to think through what is the appropriate balance? So in all of our conversations, whether that's on the engineering side or on the marketing side and product, it's like, what is that right balance? So there's no easy answers because we're ultimately looking at a lot of trade-offs, but just to talk through a few examples.
On growth, one very common approach is to get as much data as possible about your existing users and what's working to acquire them and retain them so you can target other similar users. We need to understand something about our users so that we can try to reach out to other people for whom the product would be useful, but we try to limit that data. Similarly on other sorts of logging, we look at what do we really need to know? And how do we get the minimal amount of data that helps us to understand something? So, we don't need people's IP address. To locate them to the level of like potentially even what building they're in. But it is useful for us to know where somebody is roughly. And so we look at geolocation data that is coercified at the time zone level. Like, all right, so you're in time zone. This is just kind of a quirk of how time zone stuff gets collected. We'll often have the state that it's in. it'll be like. All right, East Coast time zone, New York. It's like, all right, so we have some people coming in from New York, but we don't know what IP address we've in particular stripped that out.
Sometimes it creates extra work for us. So on the engineering side, there are a lot of standard logging and metrics libraries that you can use. They default to collecting as much data as possible about every user and everything they're doing, which makes sense if you're just trying to understand your users, what they're doing, that's very good for building your product to get that level of understanding, build the business.
But that didn't feel right to us. And so in all of these different logging libraries that we use, errors and all that, we've specifically gone to an allowless approach as opposed to a blockless. So typically they collect everything and you can say, oh, discard these pieces of data. We've gone the opposite way and said, what do we actually need? And so we'll create that minimal set of data and then we only collect that.
It's more work for us and we have less data than other companies that are maximally surveilling their users, but that felt more correct to us and more consistent with the product that we're trying to build.
And then there's another challenge too, and how do you communicate all of this to your users? So knowing that people don't really like to read and don't really want to, most people are not going to read your privacy policy. We still try to make it as clear to people. if they want to understand, as possible. We even have a table within our product that explains, here's the data that we collect and here's why. So trying to be respectful of the user, but also understanding the very practical considerations that they will have and practical considerations that we have around building a product and business.
DuckDuckGo Live Read
Rosie Tran: Today, I'd like to highlight a couple of features offered in DuckDuckGo's browser. Both are really important to know about as it relates to artificial intelligence.
Now, as you know, DuckDuckGo's search engine does not track what you search for. It also offers helpful AI summaries. Similar to what Google has, but here's the key difference. DuckDuckGo's AI summaries are more concise than what Google offers and more private. I can't stress that last point enough because a lot of information we enter online is anything but.
Now, let's talk about AI chat models for a second, like ChatGPT. Although we prefer you not use AI chat models, if you choose to do so, Duck.ai allows you to privately access them with the DuckDuckGo browser. Your data is never used to train these chat models. And your conversation with these chat models are completely private. Duck.ai costs you nothing to use, and there's no account required to do so.
And if you're like us at Stupid Sexy Privacy and you're anti-AI, you can turn off both Duck.ai and the AI search summaries right within the browser. No harm, no foul.
Clyde: Quack!
Rosie: Oh, thanks for reminding me, Clyde. I meant to include this sentence. Do you think AI slop is ruining the internet? We do too. That's why DuckDuckGo's search engine also lets you filter AI images out of your search results.
Clyde: Quack! Quack!
Rosie: I know, those images you saw of Donald Duck were very upsetting.
Clyde: Quack! Quack!
Rosie: What? I didn't make those.
Clyde: Quack! Quack!
Rosie: No, I didn't!
Andrew, can you please come get the duck? He's accusing me of creating synthetic media again and that's really offensive.
SFX
Rosie: Where was I? So, do you want to explore those AI tools without having them creep on you? Well, there's a browser designed for data protection, not data collection, and that's DuckDuckGo.
Make sure you visit DuckDuckGo.com and check out today's show notes for a link to download the DuckDuckGo browser for your laptop and mobile device.
Outro:
Today's episode of Stupid Sexy Privacy was recorded at the DuckDuckGo podcast studio in Los Angeles, California. It was written by BJ Mendelson, produced by Andrew VanVooris, and hosted by me, Rosie Tran.
Before we go, I want to give a shout out to our other co-host, Amanda King, and our sponsor, DuckDuckGo.
If you enjoy the show, we hope you'll take a moment to leave a review on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you may be listening.
This won't take more than two minutes of your time. You see, we have this crazy goal and we need your help to achieve it. We want 5% of Americans to be 1% better at protecting themselves from fascists and weirdos.
Leaving us a review could help make that happen. Because your review will help other people find the show.
So please take a moment to leave us a review and we'll see you next Thursday at midnight.
Right after you watch my episode of Comedy InvAsion on Peacock, right?