Meet Keith Porcaro
Keith Porcaro (he/him) has spent his career noticing how tech companies violate their users’ privacy in, at times, creative and unassuming ways. Whether it's by selling user data outright, monetizing access to people, or quietly changing the terms of consent once users have already agreed to them.
"It's not just that you see organizations monetizing and misusing data you entrusted to them. It's that it's couched in layers of complex language and promises that keep shifting. It's exhausting. It's a lot simpler to say: we don't have any of this data," he says.
Keith is an assistant clinical professor at Duke Law School, where his work focuses on technology and access to justice. Although he has been teaching there for nearly five years, Keith never intended on pursuing academia and rather began his career working in nonprofits and international development organizations. It was during this time that the initial waves of backlash against Facebook and other social media platforms' handling of user privacy emerged, and with it, an influx of startups making wide-reaching promises about doing business differently, pledging to "never sell user data."
Keith knew even then that these promises would be not just difficult to keep under a for-profit model, but potentially misleading. Companies didn’t need to sell data outright to affect people or violate their privacy.
Wondering how certain legal tools could be used to help people and hold companies accountable, Keith became a fellow at Harvard's Berkman Klein Center, where he began working with clients and running a data governance consultancy of his own. Keith worked with everyone, from the Mozilla Foundation to children’s hospitals and labor unions, to even small-boat fishermen—helping each of them understand how to use data in a way that's both responsible and useful.
That's where Keith started asking bigger questions about technology. "As you're delivering information or advice to people who don't normally have access to lawyers or doctors they can trust, what does it mean to do that responsibly? What does it mean to build software that takes responsibility for its users?" Keith asks.
It's no surprise then that Keith found his way to Euki, first as an advisor, and now as an official board member.
His discovery of Euki came at a timely moment for him: Raising a family in North Carolina, Keith has seen the state's reproductive health restrictions up close. "Euki felt like a really good example of the kind of organization I want to see succeed—learning about an app that provides access to trustworthy, reliable health information hit a nerve," he says.
As a board member, Keith is especially grateful to the Euki community for supporting a product that reflects a vision of providing trustworthy health information with a firm commitment to user privacy. "There's a temptation to just support the new, flashy thing, but Euki is infrastructure," he says. "It's something people rely on every day. It works quietly, and as the tech changes and the world changes, this is still something people rely on every day and is worth supporting."
As the Euki App solidifies its place as a leader in digital privacy, surpassing 320,000 downloads this week, we feel honored to have Keith's expertise, insight, and vision to help grow our work and scale our impact.