In a security assessmentAttackers call it social engineering. In a product roadmapPlatforms call it engagement.

Sylvia earned her BA in psychology at Stanford, where she served as a Teaching Assistant for Philip Zimbardo. His course on the Psychology of Mind Control examined how cults, recruiters, advertisers, and institutions shape what people believe and do, often without them noticing. It changed how she saw influence: not as something that happens to the weak-willed, but as a set of techniques that work on almost everyone when the environment is built for them.

She wasn't just reading Zimbardo. She was inside the room, translating his research for students and working directly with his methods. That experience gave her a practitioner's understanding of how environments, not individual willpower, determine behavior.

She carried that lens into a career in user experience research, leadership, and strategy, where behavioral psychology meets product design. Sylvia has worked for Xbox, Microsoft Games, Amazon, Chase, Nordstrom, Alaska Airlines, and Target, among others, studying why people behave the way they do inside digital systems and how those systems should be built to serve them.

What she saw there wasn't always encouraging. The same principles Zimbardo taught (reward variability, social proof, loss aversion, identity-based compliance) were being built into interfaces not to help users, but to keep them. Not as a side effect. As the product.

Digital Balance is built on Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, a framework that treats compulsive behavior not as weakness but as a predictable response to a poorly designed environment. That framing is Sylvia's. When a platform is engineered to exploit your cognition, understanding your own mind matters more than trying to out-willpower it.

Ryan Shanahan is an information security practitioner and executive with more than 25 years of experience protecting organizations and the people who depend on them. He has served as a CISO, built security operations programs from the ground up, and advised Fortune 500 enterprises and early-stage companies across healthcare, commercial real estate, and technology services.

A longstanding member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), Ryan brings a strong commitment to digital rights, privacy, and individual autonomy to his work at Ontic LLC and Digital Balance. His approach starts with the belief that people deserve to understand how technology influences their choices and have meaningful control over their digital lives.

His work on Digital Balance grew out of a career in adversarial security, including phishing simulations, social engineering assessments, and incident response. He also served as a SANS teaching assistant for SEC542, Web Application Penetration Testing and Ethical Hacking, including a private session for NSA students.

Years spent studying how attackers exploit human behavior revealed a troubling parallel: the same psychological mechanisms used in targeted attacks—urgency, social proof, variable rewards, and loss aversion—also shape the platforms billions of people use every day. That recognition brought his security experience and longstanding interest in digital rights together.

Ryan built Digital Balance to help people recognize these techniques, understand why they work, and make informed decisions about where their attention goes. He approaches persuasive design as a security concern, bringing the tools of threat analysis to questions of attention, manipulation, and personal agency. He is also a professional member of the Cognitive Security Institute.