In this talk, Germ Network co-founder Tessa Brown asks us to center consent in our ongoing conversations about privacy, agency, and self-determination. She describes how Germ is built for consenting connections and shares the team’s learnings from integrating atproto handles into their end-to-end encrypted messenger. As we all onboard users familiar with centralized social media paradigms into the Atmosphere, Tessa reflects on the UX design choices Germ made to help users understand what they consent to when they bring their atproto identities into Germ.