Shinigami Eyes Inspector: Why?
Shinigami Eyes is a browser extension that highlights accounts or links in common social media sites, flagging some of them in green (transfriendly) or red (transphobic). While the intentions are noble, and the technical execution is decent, it raises some concerns.
Oversight
The extension does allow users to mark accounts themselves, but this merely sends a report to the author, who then prepares the next version of the database at their discretion. The author has so far remained anonymous and rarely answers questions on the project page. Among these questions was one requesting some kind of proper collaboration channel to discuss what goes into the database, review disputes and so on.
Further complicating the matter is the fact that the extension doesn't come with a normal database, but rather a data structure that contains hashes instead of actual names (a bloom filter). This has sound reasons behind it (protecting the privacy of those marked, efficiency) but it also means there's even less visibility into the author's decisions. And as the extension surpasses a combined 100k+ user base across stores, the author begins to hold a powerful role, and accountability becomes a priority.
Consent & privacy
Another issue is the transfriendly list, which may out people who would prefer not to get the spotlight. These lists are usually built without consent, and while this is kind of the point for the transphobic list, it is a more reasonable ask for the transfriendly list. In the author's defense, the extension's marking guidelines explicitly reject being trans as a factor to be marked transfriendly, and seem to imply the category to be reserved more to activists or institutional accounts. But there have been some cases of such requests, and one of them contributed to the extension being banned in Norway.
Other
There are also some technical issues; for example, the current design uses a probabilistic data structure, which has a chance of false positives. This, combined with some other choices, makes it easy to forge usernames that would be labeled in a desired way, by triggering collisions in the database.
All of these issues are complex and linked by a variety of tradeoffs. They don't have an easy fix. In the meantime, this tool tries to provide some help by bringing visibility to information that is already freely available, in the hopes that it can help audit the author's decisions or better understand the implications of the issues at hand.