Jigsaw

Last year, we hit a significant milestone in encrypted DNS protection, and we committed to continuing to help the industry make the internet more secure and private. Today, we are sharing our latest research. 🔒 Most of us assume the HTTPS lock icon means our browsing is private. And in most critical ways, it is: what you type into a site, like your name, password, or credit card number, is encrypted. But the domain name of the website may still be visible to malicious actors. Taken together, the sites you visit tell a deeply personal story about who you are—your hobbies, health, finances, and much more– which we believe needs protection, too. That’s why a breakthrough new internet standard, Encrypted Client Hello (ECH), matters. ECH is designed to encrypt domain names, closing one of the biggest privacy gaps in web browsing. But there was a potential implementing challenge: turning ECH on by default across the whole web might possibly slow connections or cause errors. So we tested it. 📝 In our latest Research Note, we measured DNS query latency across 10,000 of the most-visited domains—comparing standard address lookups with the HTTPS Resource Record (HTTPS RR) used to enable ECH. What we found: ✅ For over 93% of domains, ECH-enabled lookups were nearly as fast as standard DNS lookups. ❌ Only 3.1% of websites showed meaningful delays, and a few dozen didn’t return a result. Based on these findings, we identified practical recommendations for developers to enable ECH while managing performance edge cases. But, more importantly, they show that there *is* a path to finally deliver stronger privacy without sacrificing (and even perhaps, enhancing!) performance, giving users the best of both worlds. It will take a broad, industry-wide effort to get there—but testing ECH is a critical step to instill confidence in the organizations that will eventually roll it out, and our results to date have been extremely encouraging. Read our Research Note and tell us what you think!

✨Jigsaw is #hiring in NYC! ↪️ Do you enjoy forging brand new, high-impact partnerships? ↪️ Excited to launch AI innovations to serve the public good? ↪️ Want to map and mobilize an ecosystem that is inspired to scale? Take a look at our open Strategic Partnerships Development Manager role if you want to do mission-driven work within a nimble interdisciplinary team, collaborating with Product, Eng, and PgM to advance each initiative, developing strong, impactful partnerships to bring it all to life. If interested, please apply directly:  🚀 Strategic Partnerships Development Manager - https://lnkd.in/e5pR68pb

Great recap from Jon Berroya on an incredible week at SXSW. We walked away with a deep appreciation for the problems keeping mayors up at night  — and it was a privilege to explore together how tools like Jigsaw's Sensemaking can help bridge the gap between hearing community feedback and acting on it. Excited to keep learning alongside these leaders. 🎉

We tuned into Google for Health's annual event, #TheCheckUp, last week and it got us thinking about a simple but crucial question: how can technology not only empower people to better understand the basics of their healthcare—but navigate the complexity of healthcare systems? The Check Up showed how AI is already boosting *instrumental* agency by making healthcare more accurate, personalized, and effective—a goal for patients, providers, innovators, and experts. But can AI also improve *structural* agency by ensuring people are able to make sense of, and then act within, all the processes and tools that shape their care? One moment brought that thought into particular focus: In her remarks, Amy Gleason shared the story of a patient whose access to her own health data—heart rate, sleep, activity—helped keep her out of the ER and reduce her anxiety. What mattered most wasn’t just the data itself, but what understanding that data unlocked: reassurance, confidence, and ultimately, more informed decisions about her health. It was a recurring theme throughout the event, from efforts to expand care in rural communities to tools that help clinicians and patients make sense of complex medical information. Every time, the takeaway was the same: technology can help give people a sense of clarity and control in moments that otherwise feel overwhelming. Healthcare is yet another area where giving people more agency can make a meaningful difference. Where else? 🎬 Watch the full event here: https://lnkd.in/grq7yhgU

The content of the information we see online is 🔐 protected. But which websites we visit in the first place are often still visible, and this can reveal a lot about us—where we live, what we do, what we care about, even how we think. Closing that gap—encrypting where we go online—is critical for the future of privacy. The good news is there’s been a significant breakthrough. Just last week, OpenSSL Corporation—the open-source security engine that powers networking libraries and millions of websites globally—introduced support for Encrypted Client Hello (ECH) in its 4.0 Alpha 1 release. Why is this such a big deal? 🤔 Because now more developers can address those vulnerabilities by taking advantage of the privacy benefits of ECH. While the details about ECH get complicated quickly, the point is simple: Achieving true privacy depends on taking ECH from idea to reality across the web, which starts with giving developers tools and resources 🔧 to deploy it widely. OpenSSL’s work is a critical step in that direction: because OpenSSL powers secure connections for millions of websites, its support for ECH will help accelerate progress. More soon on our own efforts to strengthen online privacy through ECH. Read on ➡️ https://lnkd.in/eTBfvXhR #ECH #Privacy #Encryption

✨Jigsaw is #hiring in NYC! ↪️ Do you enjoy rapid prototyping? ↪️ Want to translate research into real-world impact? ↪️ Fancy a role focused on 0-1 innovation with AI to address societal issues? Take a look at our open Engineering roles if you want to do mission-driven work within a nimble interdisciplinary team, with connections to academia and civil society, and a quick path to taking technology public! If interested, please apply directly:  🚀 Staff Software Engineer, AI/ML - https://lnkd.in/eYKSEpAK 🚀 Senior UX Engineer - https://lnkd.in/eJhMCq3W

As cities explore what it means to become "AI-ready," Google is focusing not just on deploying new technologies, but also on how we can help local governments better understand – and serve – their communities. In Bowling Green, KY, our team at Jigsaw leaned into that second piece: using AI to help local leaders host one of the largest town halls in U.S. history and enabling thousands of residents to share input on their hopes for the city’s future. It's a powerful example of how AI can help governments connect more directly with constituents and support civic engagement at scale. Read more about how Google is helping cities implement technology strategies with the new “Mayors AI Playbook” 👉 https://lnkd.in/e8ZN9vVs also covered in Axios: https://lnkd.in/eFm9sRWQ

For billions of devices to "talk" to each other safely across the internet, they need a common language. Internet Standards are the agreed-upon technical specifications that ensure the web remains open, interoperable, and secure. One you likely use every day is HTTPS (Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure). The "S" matters: It ensures that the content of sites we visit remains hidden to network observers. 🛡️ Why are we talking about standards…? Because it’s #DataPrivacyWeek! Even though HTTPS encrypts the content of sites we visit, the domain names remain visible to network observers. That information may seem harmless, but at scale it can reveal patterns about our location, job, hobbies and even beliefs — all of which can be used for profiling, censorship, or targeted attacks. One key to closing this gap is a new standard – Encrypted Client Hello (ECH). Rolling it out at scale will require a deep understanding of its impact on performance, which we are excited to study at Jigsaw. 🌐 Learn more about how we are advancing these important protocols: https://lnkd.in/eqUGMGt6

As we step into a new year, it is natural to look for reasons to be optimistic about our collective future. In a recent episode of On the Ballot with Ballotpedia's Norman Leahy, Jigsaw CEO Yasmin Green joined Scott Rasmussen to discuss how our latest work offers a powerful reason to be hopeful. They explained that while we are more connected to information and each other than ever before, many citizens feel disconnected from the systems and institutions, like government and media, that impact their lives. To help point the way forward, we partnered with the Napolitan Institute on We the People (wethepeople-250.org) to see if AI could be used to give Americans true civic voice. Instead of the standard social media "feed" that amplifies the loudest 1%, we utilized AI to have a nationwide conversation with over 2,400 people, representing each congressional district, to create a sort of "Google Maps for opinion terrain." The results provide a hopeful signal for the year ahead: - Before the conversation, only 30% of participants felt heard by fellow Americans. After one hour of AI-facilitated discussion, that number jumped to 68%. - 94% participants felt the final output represented their views. 🎧 Listen to the full episode to see how AI can help us move from "memes to meaning": https://lnkd.in/esmBe939

Thank you for joining us on an exciting 🚘 journey 🚘 in 2025, full of new projects, partnerships, and research. Looking forward to even more in 2026!