Tracy Chou

You’re getting stalked.

Harassed.

Doxxed.

The social media platform says: “This doesn’t violate our policies.”

Tracy Chou heard that one too many times. So she stopped reporting and started building.

Tracy was a Stanford-trained software engineer.

A second hire at Quora.

A founding engineer at Pinterest, shipping everything from infrastructure to growth.

Quietly brilliant. Head down. Crushing code.

Then, in 2013, she published one blog post asking a simple question: “Where are the numbers?”

A challenge to tech companies to reveal how few women were in engineering roles.

It went viral.

Tracy went from backend engineer to accidental face of diversity in tech.

But visibility came at a cost.

Trolls.

Stalkers.

10,000 password reset requests.

Conspiracy theorists claiming she was married to James Comey.

Real-life threats.

Real-life fear.

She reported it. Platforms shrugged.

So she did what Silicon Valley loves to preach but rarely practices: she built the product she needed.

Block Party was born in 2018... not as a startup idea, but as self-defense.

What started as a Twitter anti-harassment filter has grown into a powerful browser extension used across 9+ platforms.

It deep cleans your social media, locks down privacy settings, and gives users back control of their data.

Because Tracy knows: what starts online rarely stays there.
Venmo. Strava. Instagram.

We’re bleeding personal information by default.

And for women, activists, and marginalized communities... that can be life-threatening.

So Block Party does the hard part: scans your accounts, flags your risks, and helps you wipe your data trail before someone weaponizes it.

And she’s not stopping there.

She’s advocating for legislation that would force platforms to open their APIs.

Why? So third-party tools like Block Party can exist without permission.

She wants a future where people can build their own feeds, filters, and safety nets... not beg corporations to care.

In Tracy’s world, privacy isn’t a product feature. It’s a fundamental right.

Stanford Terman Scholar. TIME Woman of the Year. Forbes 30 Under 30. Co-founder of Project Include.

She’s graced the covers of WIRED, The Atlantic, and MIT Tech Review.