Saif Zihiri

Saifeldeen (Saif) Zihiri is an incoming JD student at Yale Law School. He graduated from Hunter College with a bachelor’s degree in Political Science, Religion and a Certificate in Human Rights.

Saif has previously worked at various civil rights organizations, including the Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect, the American Civil Liberties Union and the Southern Poverty Law Centre. His research interests include the movements of hate groups(outside of a War on Terror lens), the impact of national security on marginalized communities, and the encroaching danger of tech companies against individual and community privacy. His research has taken him from Ghana to South Korea, focusing on everything from community-led strategies against extremism to the QAnon movement. In his free time, he involves himself with pottery and various board games.

Using a case study, the team aims to evaluate the impact of privacy intrusions on the ways in which marginalized communities, in particular the Muslim-American community, interact with commercial mobile applications. They additionally plan to examine the ways in which these privacy intrusions pose a risk to the safety of marginalized communities and erode the trust that such communities have in apps and technology in general. Finally, they will assess the effect that discontinued app use among marginalized communities following privacy intrusions may have on future innovation derived from user data. With the support of the JURIST Digital Scholars Program, they hope to publish an article detailing our findings.