Sovright Welcomes Colby Thomson to Its Board of Directors

Financial privacy is easy to endorse and hard to build, and the organizations defending it need leaders who have done this work under real-world pressure. To that end, Sovright has appointed Colby Thomson, a Human Rights Foundation director and founder of the Good Ancestor Foundation, to its board of directors.

Thomson brings over a decade of nonprofit and corporate governance in human rights and financial privacy to an organization building infrastructure for individual digital sovereignty. He has served on boards touching industries from insurance (Guardian Life), to investment management (Allied Strategy), to human rights (Human Rights Foundation and ALLFED). Few individuals combine a builder’s grasp of technology and business alongside a decade governing work where security meant survival, and we’re thrilled to join forces with Thomson to advance Sovright’s mission.

From human rights to financial privacy

Thomson’s career has centered on the individual’s ability to act freely without surveillance or interference.

Since 2016, Thomson has served on the board of the Human Rights Foundation, an organization that funds the privacy and free-expression technology people rely on under repressive governments. Much of the organization’s work involved documenting state repression and funding the tools activists use to communicate and move money safely. He is also the founder and chief executive of the Good Ancestor Foundation, a nonprofit that funds work across digital security, artificial intelligence and biosecurity, societal resilience, and human rights.

Beyond that, Thomson has also worked in the early field of AI safety, serving as a director of strategy at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute. This work gave him a long view of the risks advanced technology poses to individual autonomy, and a unique perspective on how to design financial products that protect customer privacy.

What connects these different experiences is a conviction that freedom depends on reliable infrastructure. All of this is relevant to the issues that drive Sovright, namely how a person keeps control of their money, their data, and their choices as technology develops.

That shared conviction is what makes Thomson a natural fit for a team focused on supporting individual choice. His appointment gives the organization more depth for the work ahead, as the pressure on individual privacy continues to mount worldwide.