Be Kind to People, But Be Relentless With Institutions

Kindness and patience are essential qualities for privacy advocates. To grow our movement, we must meet people from a place of camaraderie. People don't change their mind by being berated. However, this isn't true for institutions.

Here's how you can integrate kindness in your work, while being relentless with institutions:

Use kindness and patience while working with individuals

Whenever you talk with individuals in your privacy work, make sure to stay kind and calm when communicating with them.

Perhaps you are posting on social media, replying to posts or emails, answering questions after a talk, or writing advices on the best privacy tools to use. No matter the context, when communicating with individuals, kindness is your greatest asset to persuade and bring more people to the movement.

Sadly, it's not rare to see replies to beginners' posts by more advanced peers online that are humiliating and berating their uninformed or misinformed questions. People don't learn and don't change their mind by being yelled at. Aggression isn't an effective way to communicate.

Furthermore, aggression is a horrible strategy to bring more people to your cause, which should be your ultimate goal as a privacy rights advocate and activist.

Instead, be gentle and develop your empathy skills. Write from a place of compassion, to gradually attract more and more new people to the cause.

Stay patient and compassionate, even when people ask questions that might sound obvious to you. Be patient when people don't understand the first time you explain something. Happily clarify with simpler terms when needed, without being condescending.

Accept that some people might not be able to adopt all of your suggestions at once. It's okay, let them grow at their own pace.

Give time for ideas to brew and change minds. Plant seeds for change, and gently wait for growth.

Be relentless with corporations, governments, and public institutions

While patience and kindness are crucial to bring your message the right way to individuals, institutions do not function the same way.

Whether you are trying to report a privacy-abusive corporate practice, push back against an invasive regulation proposal, or raise awareness about a public institution's privacy malpractices, you must be firm, loud, and determined.

Respect and politeness are vital here as well. Violence or threat to representatives of these institutions would only be detrimental to your goals. However, patience shouldn't be extended to privacy-abusive organizations that aren't demonstrating any realistic intentions to improve.

==To bring significant changes to institutions and corporations, your message must be loud and clear.==

You should try to bring as many people and allied organizations to your cause, and be as loud as possible in the media. Your campaign must be powerful enough to grab media's attention, and to send a firm message that the people want change and will not back down.

Each time your message is ignored, and the abuse continues, shout louder (metaphorically). Bring even more people to the cause, until the popular discontent is so strong that they have no choice but to stop the abuse.

More resources

• Rich resource for campaign strategy and community organizing (The Commons Social Change Library)

• Campaign canvas template (Mobilisation Lab)

• Campaigning guides for activists (Activist Handbook)

• How to do public speaking for activism (Activist Handbook)

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