​It’s Ricki here! Transgender Day of Visibility is a powerful day for the trans community to be seen and heard. If you’re anything like me, you’ll be looking for ways to celebrate in Colorado. Well, one event I can point you to is a movie screening in Denver. 

Just as importantly, whether you are in Colorado or not, we want to make sure that you stay safe while trying to find events. So I’ll also be going over ways to keep your online activities secure.

Honorable Mentions

Before diving into a TDOV event and internet safety, I want to take the time to honor some trans*, Colorado-based public speakers who have taken visibility as a career. 

Todd Garrity is a transgender public speaker who lectures on the importance of trans healthcare knowledge, mediates conferences and support groups, and has a trans-oriented acupuncture and meditation center called The Om Flow.  
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Anunnaki Ray is a motivational speaker, blogger, artist, and activist. Assigned female at birth, they grew into their non-binary, male-presenting self and is the first person in Colorado have their biological sex changed to ‘intersex’ to properly reflect their natural body. 

Personal Stories also features trans* stories about both transitioning and visibility and is constantly updating their database. 

CELEBRATE IN DENVER!

If you can go out to celebrate TDOV and find yourself in Denver, The Center on Colfax is hosting a screening of Becoming More Visible, which follows the lives of four people in various parts of their transition. The documentary dives into who they are beyond their transition and how they exist in the world around them. It addresses religious family issues, the shelter system, and developing a successful career as a visible trans person. 

This event is free with an online RSVP here. Otherwise, Becoming More Visible is available on Amazon Prime—a fun activity for people with their own Amazon Prime account. 

CELEBRATE WHILE STAYING SAFE ONLINE

Being safe on TDOV includes knowing when not to be visible. You know your situation better than anybody, but here are a few tips that you can use. 

If you are on a shared computer make sure you’re using an account that is only accessible to you on a secure browser type, like Brave, that won’t track your Amazon choices for advertising if you do choose to watch Becoming More Visible. 

Before I go into how useful this browser is in order to surf the gay, gay web I want to disclose that this is NOT a paid advertisement. This is a genuine push for a browser that is compatible with our mission statement and with programs we already endorse. 

Brave recently hit the market with an incredible amount of customizable security and privacy dependent on your needs—choose which kinds of cookies and device recognitions to get through to you and what doesn’t. Brave is built on not collecting personal data while also being as user-friendly as possible. It’s compatible with DuckDuckGo, a functional search engine that doesn’t collect personal data and we highly recommend through our resource database. 

Because of privacy risk to you, Brave automatically blocks plug-ins and upgrades encryptions. The browser is also available.  And it’s totally free. Surfing the web for visible trans* people shouldn’t put you in the digital spotlight—part of TDOV is being visible in order to acknowledge, protect, and fight for stealth and closeted individuals. 

​We are VERY hard on facebook.  

And for good reason.  

This organization started because of the Facebook Real Names Policy in early 2013 and to this day we harp on Facebook’s refusal to protect LGBTQ+ people by providing alias names, securing data and information better, not catering to peoples’ privacy, and generally sucking at community anonymity when we ask them to.  

But something changed recently in Mark Zuckerberg’s little scrooge heart (possibly robotic?).

A week ago Zuckerberg published a near 3,200-word blog about a shift from public information social networks to private networks.  And that’s VERY good for all of you. 

In this blog, Zuckerberg admitted to the security problems with his platform and announced he will be pivoting to a security-based social platform that we feel holds a lot of promise for your safety, security, and anonymity on the web.

So in this blog, we’re going to go over his letter to let you know what may or may not be “troubling”.

Now fortunately for you, there is no need to read all 3,200 hundred words of the CEO’s admission of guilt because it’s all pretty technical.  

Zuckerberg starts out by suggesting a few ideas about what the future of the internet will entail and we are VERY proud of him here.  He is championing from here on out:

​That sounds all well and good but how is he going to make the current Facebook Juggernaut of platforms (that run on modern marketing companies abusing customer metadata in surveillance marketing) into a safe privacy first, encrypted network that we feel safe using?  

Right now, according to the Online Data Privacy survey, a whopping 83% of Americans believe that too much of their personal information is being made public without their consent and virtually all of them are worried about that information being stolen or abused.  
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So in my opinion...

It’s too soon to tell when these features will be rolled out, if they’ll be useful, and whether they are going to be made in your interest.  Plenty of politicians submit well-meaning population focused bills to Congress that turn into money-grubbing industry-focused laws and that’s no different for technology.  

​Take your safety security and anonymity into your own hands.  Follow our 5-steps to your anonymity and join our already implemented social communities on known safe platforms:

For today’s blog, I want to introduce you to a person who has no idea they’ve made a massive impact on the closeted LGBTQ+ community.  

She is a very prominent lawyer who has worked for one of the richest men in the world.  She’s an online small business lawyer, and as far as I am aware, she has nothing to do with the queer community.

This woman’s name is Suzanne Dibble.  
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​Before I can tell you about Suzanne, we need to go back to a specific event in LGBTQ+ history:  The Facebook Real Names Policy.

​Fast forward several years and we can see that a vast majority of the distrust against Facebook and literally every other data-mining business including Google and YouTube largely began in these early years of social media between 2010-2014. 

Today we live in a world where it's legal for any company to pigeonhole users into disclosing every aspect of themselves for "marketing based on surveillance" which we call "analytics".  

These are marketing tactics based on stalking every user every second of their life.  I discussed how this works in my previous blog, "Why the Web is Built to Out You, and How You can Avoid it."

​Since the Facebook real names policy and Cambridge Analytica scandals, the small businesses and the marketing industry as a whole has been in the spotlight for abusing surveillance marketing tactics.
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And in this world Suzanne Dibble has made her career navigating small businesses ethically and properly through this gigantic mess of big data farming for marketing purposes.  

When a broad-sweeping set of regulations and laws called the General Data Protection Regulation or GDPR passed in the European Union in 2017, marketing companies FLIPPED. 

GDPR severely restricts how the internet uses your user data.  This is the reason every company HAS to inform you cookies are a thing and why. If you don't know what cookies are we made a blog here.

But Suzanne went a step further. 

Suzanne made a businesses that not only allowed businesses to navigate GDPR, but she discussed the future of data protection and the END OF SURVEILLANCE MARKETING!!!

For her, this era of mass data abuse will end.  There is no stopping it. Instead of waiting for hard-fought laws to change businesses, she's making businesses change culturally BEFORE the laws even change at all! 

Every client who takes her advice, will naturally, without knowing it, become a little more closet-friendly. 

And for that, Suzanne Dibble, Lawyer extraordinaire, is helping to end a dangerous era for LGBTQ+ people, People of Color, and virtually every other net-citizen.  

So I would like to nominate right now,  Suzanne Dibble for the just now invented, totally should be real, “RESCQU.NET Unsung Internet Improvement Hero Award".
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From the bottom of my heart, thank you.  It was amazing to meet you. And I hope you read this.  Keep doing your work in amazing and fantastic ways.  

​~ Samantha