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A Stalker's Paradise: How Intimate Partner Abusers Exploit Technology
Abstract
This paper describes a qualitative study with 89 participants that details how abusers in intimate partner violence (IPV) contexts exploit technologies to intimidate, threaten, monitor, impersonate, harass, or otherwise harm their victims. We show that, at their core, many of the attacks in IPV contexts are technologically unsophisticated from the perspective of a security practitioner or researcher. For example, they are often carried out by a UI-bound adversary - an adversarial but authenticated user that interacts with a victim»s device or account via standard user interfaces - or by downloading and installing a ready-made application that enables spying on a victim. Nevertheless, we show how the sociotechnical and relational factors that characterize IPV make such attacks both extremely damaging to victims and challenging to counteract, in part because they undermine the predominant threat models under which systems have been designed. We discuss the nature of these new IPV threat models and outline opportunities for HCI research and design to mitigate these attacks.
... Multiple studies describe technology-based monitoring as excessive calling, texting, and emailing from the abuser, monitoring social media or devices to ascertain whereabouts, or snooping into private digital information without permission (Douglas et al., 2019;Freed et al., 2018;Messing et al., 2020;Zaidi et al., 2015). Monitoring is the most frequently reported form of TBA across age groups, used as a control tactic during and following an abusive relationship (Douglas et al., 2019;Dragiewicz et al., 2018). ...
... The experience and intent of these messages are important for determining whether and when monitoring behaviors are abusive (Reed et al., 2017). Online monitoring cannot be identified simply through the volume of messages or disruption of daily life; the content of the messages (e.g., threats) and intent of the abuser (e.g., engendering fear) are also important (Freed et al., 2018;Messing et al., 2020). ...
... Another form of TBA described in research among adults is aggression and humiliation, in which perpetrators directly threaten or use their knowledge of the survivor to publicly instill fear (Freed et al., 2018). Humiliating content shared online may include phone numbers, addresses, private conversations, rumors about the survivor, or personal health information (Douglas et al., 2019;Freed et al., 2018;Messing et al., 2020). ...
Research about technology-based abuse (TBA) has primarily relied on youth-focused survey research, leading to gaps in knowledge about the experiences of TBA among adult populations. However, studies among adult intimate partner violence (IPV) survivors suggest that TBA is a pervasive problem warranting attention. This study builds on the limited existing literature about adult experiences of TBA by examining patterns of TBA among adult abuse survivors ( n = 377). Latent class analysis showed three distinct patterns of TBA: technology-based emotional abuse, technology-based monitoring, and technology-based control. Multinomial regression analyses demonstrated that TBA co-occurs with offline IPV. Findings reinforce the significant role of TBA in adult IPV survivors’ lives and highlight the importance of assessing for TBA among survivors.
... To cope with TFA, survivors rely on different formal and informal support networks [23,48,50,54]. Formal support networks consist of professional support providers who may be in a position of power and authority [108], such as therapists, IPV survivor advocacy organizations, customer support executives, Title IX and resident advisors in universities, and stakeholders of the criminal justice system. ...
... TFA includes spying, stalking, online abuse, hate speech, doxxing, and other forms of harassment using technology [28,49,54,89,90,113]. Most abusers exploit UI-bound survivors' smartphones to stalk them [48]. Abusers install readily available spyware [67,90] or dual-use applications [6,28], misconfigure apps and social media accounts, and abuse smart-home technology like smart speakers or door locks [65,98,103,105,106] to coerce and control survivors [112]. ...
... The complexity and inaccessibility of the user interfaces of modern technology and the "invisible" nature of TFA make it difficult to identify and mitigate the abuse [23,49,50,106]. Survivors may not be technologysavvy or have access to technology experts [48,66,72]. Moreover, survivors face severe economic, health, and housing insecurity [68]. ...
Technology-facilitated abuse (TFA) from an intimate partner is a growing concern for survivors' safety and security. Prior research introduced tailored interventions to support the survivors of TFA. However, most survivors do not have access to these interventions or are unaware of the appropriate support networks and resources in their community. We conducted nine semi-structured interviews to examine survivors' support-seeking dynamics from their social networks and the effectiveness of social networks in addressing survivors' needs. Through survivors' lived experiences, we systematize socio-technical barriers that impede the participant from seeking support and challenges in seeking support. Further, we identify coping mechanisms used by the survivors despite those barriers and challenges. Through a participatory lens, we echo survivors' call for action to improve support networks and propose recommendations for technology design to promote safer support-seeking practices and resources, consciousness-raising awareness campaigns, and collaborations with the community. Finally, we call for a restorative-justice-oriented framework that recognizes TFA.
... The buyer would then be acting in bad faith if they sell the data. 15 Similarly, if they find a draft of a book written by the seller, they would be acting illegally and in bad faith if they publish it under their own name. 16 However, this depends on the interpretation and specific criteria for the intellectual property status of the document. ...
... 3 of the Federal Act on Copyright and Related Rights of 9 October 1992, Copyright Act, CopA; RS231.1). 15 They risk violating a norm that protects the economic interests tied to a secret, such as the Art. 5 and 23 of the Federal Act on Unfair Competition of 19 December 1986 (FAUC; RS 241) or the Art. 162 SCC. ...
... Some questions in our survey asked the respondents to confess illegal activities (e.g., declaring activities related to data carving or having unlawfully processed data found on their storage device) they had done, if any. While collecting self-incriminating data is a common approach in some research topics (see, for example, intimate partner violence [15], cyberbullying [23], and coercive sexting [33]) it can subject research participants to risk. To protect our participants, we ensured not to be subject to any obligation to report a criminal offense and anonymized the data in order to not be able to re-identify the respondents. ...
Second-hand electronic devices are increasingly being sold online. Although more affordable and more environment-friendly than new products, second-hand devices, in particular those with storage capabilities, create security and privacy threats (e.g., malware or confidential data still stored on the device, aka remnant data). Previous work studied this issue from a technical point of view or only from the perspective of the sellers of the devices, but the perspective of the buyers has been largely overlooked. In this paper, we fill this gap and take a multi-disciplinary approach, focusing on the case of Switzerland. First, we conduct a brief legal analysis of the rights and obligations related to second-hand storage devices. Second, in order to understand the buyers' practices related to these devices and their beliefs about their legal rights and obligations, we deploy a survey in collaboration with a major online platform for transactions of second-hand goods. We demonstrate that the risks highlighted in prior research might not materialize, as many buyers do not inspect the content of the bought devices (e.g., they format it directly). We also found that none of the buyers uses forensic techniques. We identified that the buyers' decisions about remnant data depend on the type of data. For instance, for data with illegal content, they would keep the data to report it to the authorities, whereas for sensitive personal data they would either delete the data or contact the sellers. We identified several discrepancies between the actual legal rights/obligations and users' beliefs.
... Dragiewicz et al. (2018) among others, reported the ways that phones, social media, location technology, text messaging, account access, online information, and images were used for coercive control of intimate partners. Freed et al. (2018) described the use of apps and account features as spyware. Tanczer et al. (2018) sounded an alarm about the hijacking of IoT smart home technologies by one member of a household against others. ...
... For example, large companies like Google or Apple curate app stores, develop and market Internet of Things (IoT) products, and manage communications channels (e.g. email, messaging, and file sharing), all of which can be tools used to perpetrate harms such as genderbased violence while simultaneously acting as tools to enhance individual and community safety, social connection, and wellbeing (Dragiewicz et al. 2018;Freed et al. 2018;Leitão 2021;Messing et al. 2020). Users also subvert intended and unintended uses, both to cause harms, as well as to resist those harms. ...
Trust and Safety work mitigates certain social risks and harms of digital technologies. In a landscape that is only slowly establishing regulatory oversight mechanisms, Trust and Safety work performs a type of internal governance by attempting to mitigate disinformation, online harassment, extremism, and other harms accelerated or amplified by technology products and services. With origins in content moderation, Trust and Safety work now also includes product advice for online services and IRL (in real life) products. Attention to Trust and Safety work can complicate a monolithic view of what tech work is and who does it, as well as point to locations for intervention as we seek to promote Public Interest Technology in globally impactful sociotechnical systems.
... Content moderation heavily relies on manual content assessment toward community guidelines (Seering, 2020) and on platform users who flag content they regard as violating guidelines (Crawford & Gillespie, 2016). Concerning forms of netspeak, such content moderation practices are necessary because linguistic variations or coded language are frequently used with bad intention to avoid algorithmic detection, for example, by political extremists to spread hate (Ben-David & Fernández, 2016;Bhat & Klein, 2020), to advocate controversial health information, for example, in pro-eating disorder communities (Chancellor et al., 2016), or as forms of online harassment, hate speech, and threat (Freed et al., 2018). ...
... For this, we specifically wanted to talk with TikTok users who demonstrated experience using algospeak when creating and sharing videos. We followed a qualitative research process (Flick, 2008) to analyze the creation and sharing of video content on TikTok as a way to interpret user data that emerges from everyday settings (Jensen, 2013). We first compiled a list of algospeak terms, and then used these terms to search for potential participants to ensure that we would talk to video creators who used algospeak in its intended meaning on TikTok. ...
Social media users have long been aware of opaque content moderation systems and how they shape platform environments. On TikTok, creators increasingly utilize algospeak to circumvent unjust content restriction, meaning, they change or invent
words to prevent TikTok’s content moderation algorithm from banning their video (e.g., “le$bean” for “lesbian”). We interviewed 19 TikTok creators about their motivations and practices of using algospeak in relation to their experience with TikTok’s content moderation. Participants largely anticipated how TikTok’s algorithm would read their videos, and used algospeak to evade unjustified content moderation while simultaneously ensuring target audiences can still find their videos. We identify non-contextuality, randomness, inaccuracy, and bias against marginalized communities as major issues regarding freedom of expression, equality of subjects, and support for communities of interest. Using algospeak, we argue for a need to improve contextually informed content moderation to valorize marginalized and tabooed audiovisual content on social media.
... Additionally, participants raised concerns about survivors' access to and use of home security technology in cases where they lacked technological autonomy. Abusers can use family mobile phone plans and other shared accounts to control, stalk, and/or harass victims often undetected (Clinic to End Tech Abuse 2020; Freed et al. 2018) which increases the vulnerability of victims. Survivors may be at increased risk of abuse if home security technology is connected to shared accounts. ...
Millions of Americans experience intimate partner and sexual violence each year. Research notes that abusers often use technology to facilitate power-based violence and abuse through stalking, impersonating, monitoring, isolating, and exerting control over victims. However, little is known about the role home security technology, specifically, can play in protecting and empowering survivors. To fill this gap, this exploratory research uses semi-structured interviews with service providers and survivors to better understand the use of home security technology for survivors of intimate partner and sexual violence. The data illustrate that this technology has the potential to increase survivors’ safety and well-being, but several concerns and challenges must be addressed. Implications for the use of home security technology for survivors and recommendations for addressing possible barriers are discussed.
... Vasiu and Vasiu (2020) stated that instances of extortion on the TikTok platform encompass a range of manifestations, such as the use of public humiliation as a threat, the broadcast of sensitive information, or the exploitation of personal connections. The act of blackmailing on the TikTok platform commonly entails threats to disseminate or distribute content that is deemed embarrassing, intimate, or incriminating, with the condition that the victim complies with the demands put forth by the perpetrator (Freed et al., 2018;Powell and Henry, 2016;. Extortion and blackmail on TikTok can significantly impact the emotional well-being, reputation, and overall sense of safety of its victims. ...
Background: TikTok, a social media application, has gained tremendous popularity in recent years, with a broad spectrum of users from all ages, different countries and cultures. However, major concerns in the field of mental health related to the use of such platforms have consequentially emerged. This particular research aimed to analyse the usage patterns associated with the social media platform, TikTok, and its cascading psychological effects among young Mauritian adults. Methodology: The cross-sectional study adopted a quantitative approach with a sample of 400 Mauritians meeting the inclusion criteria. A self-reported questionnaire examining self-esteem, Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) and mental health determinants was designed and administered primarily through online mediums. Findings: 30.5% of the participants used TikTok for 1 h to 2 h, while 12.3% used it for 2 h to 3 h daily, and the most prevalent reason for TikTok use was leisure (73.5%). Adverse psychological effects, characterised by pessimism (33.3%), restlessness (35.1%), uselessness (39.8%), anxiety (38%), depressive behaviours (36.5%), lower self-esteem (17%), and FOMO (41.7%), were depicted among the sampled participants. An increase in FOMO led to lower self-esteem (rs = −0.326, p < 0.05), heightened anxiety (rs = 0.467, p < 0.05) and a potential increase in depressive symptoms (rs = 0.338, p < 0.05). There was a significant difference in anxiety levels when perception of self-directed negative comments was assessed (U = 11,852.500, z = −4.808, p < 0.05). Conclusion: This study empirically revealed that the general use of TikTok in itself appears to be non-problematic; rather, its unhealthy excessive usage triggers deleterious mental health among TikTok users. The findings also pointed towards sensitization measures and psychoeducation towards the appropriate use of social media platforms such as TikTok.
... Moreover, current security narratives around smart home technologies that stress policing the threshold of the home are underpinned by assumptions that compound the risks to domestic abuse victims. Such narratives assume that users are the same as account owners, that end-users do not intend to use technologies harmfully, that there is trust between co-residents, and that privacy issues concern 'stranger danger' from outside (Freed et al., 2018). Studies have shown that the work of setting up, programming and maintaining smart home technologies -also known as digital housekeeping -is usually performed by one person in the household, frequently one who identifies as male (Aagaard, 2023;Kennedy et al., 2015). ...
Today many homes are accessible from afar, with mobile phones functioning as remote controls for technologies within the home. In this article we propose the ‘leaky home’ as a conceptual figure to understand how automated homes that leak through connected devices and sensors that collect, transmit, receive and share data are experienced and sensed by bodies within these distributed spaces. The leak brings together postmodern metaphors of fluidity and the 21st century discourse of information leaks, while maintaining infrastructural connotations of substances that shift domain in very tangible ways. By looking at a series of examples from media accounts and research conducted in Denmark, the UK, the USA and Australia, ranging from everyday family practices to digital coercive control, we explore how the care-control complex of the home is impacted by its leaky nature.
... The ability to target any individual-while often a gendered harm disproportionately affecting women-can impact anyone, making this a widespread societal issue. It threatens the freedoms of those who are targeted, as well as those who may be threatened with becoming future targets [12,38,48,56]. ...
Non-consensual intimate media (NCIM) presents internet-scale harm to individuals who are depicted. One of the most powerful tools for requesting its removal is the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). However, the DMCA was designed to protect copyright holders rather than to address the problem of NCIM. Using a dataset of more than 54,000 DMCA reports and over 85 million infringing URLs spanning over a decade, this paper evaluates the efficacy of the DMCA for NCIM takedown. Results show less than 50% of infringing URLs are removed from website hosts in 60 days, and Google Search takes a median of 11.7 days to deindex infringing content. Across web hosts, only 4% of URLs are removed within the first 48 hours. Additionally, the most frequently reported domains for non-commercial NCIM are smaller websites, not large platforms. We stress the need for new laws that ensure a shorter time to takedown that are enforceable across big and small platforms alike.
... This line of inquiry has made noteworthy advancements in addressing a whole range of otherwise neglected issues, including such themes as domestic tech-abuse and 'smart' violence against women 2 (e.g. Chatterjee et al. 2018;Dimond et al. 2011;Freed et al. 2018;Lopez-Neira et al. 2019; PenzeyMoog and Slakoff 2021; Slupska 2019), gendered division between traditional and digital housekeeping 3 (e.g. Aagaard 2023; Aagaard and Madsen 2022;Sinanan and Horst 2021;Strengers and Nicholls 2018), and non-nuclear housing (e.g. ...
Drawing on feminist technology studies’ interventions in current
research on smart homes, this article offers an analysis of recent
cultural artifacts that – in contrast to the predominant marketized
narratives infused with androcentricity and biased toward a
reaffirmation of stereotypical gender roles – dislocate the
conventional power relations within the technologized domestic
space. The article elaborates an original concept of a ‘wicked
vestal’, which may serve as a heuristic tool to capture the
revisionist dynamics operating within (and partly enabled by) the
technology-imbued home. The article argues, that creative
subversions of the mainstream discourse on smartification offered
by literary/artistic/cinematic products may add nuance to the
existent discussions on smart technologies, offering a glimpse
into the processes of a (dis)harmonious integration of technology
and domesticity, alerting consumers of smart devices to, and
possibly readying them for, the precariousness lurking in an
unpredictable, capitalism-ridden techno-future.
... As with other forms of technology-facilitated abuseincluding intimate partner abuse [93], stalkerware [34], and interpersonal surveillance [99]-the support needs of people experiencing IBSA (victim-survivors) are complex. Perpetrators can be intimate partners, peers, or strangers. ...
Image-based sexual abuse (IBSA), like other forms of technology-facilitated abuse, is a growing threat to people's digital safety. Attacks include unwanted solicitations for sexually explicit images, extorting people under threat of leaking their images, or purposefully leaking images to enact revenge or exert control. In this paper, we explore how people seek and receive help for IBSA on social media. Specifically, we identify over 100,000 Reddit posts that engage relationship and advice communities for help related to IBSA. We draw on a stratified sample of 261 posts to qualitatively examine how various types of IBSA unfold, including the mapping of gender, relationship dynamics, and technology involvement to different types of IBSA. We also explore the support needs of victim-survivors experiencing IBSA and how communities help victim-survivors navigate their abuse through technical, emotional, and relationship advice. Finally, we highlight sociotechnical gaps in connecting victim-survivors with important care, regardless of whom they turn to for help.
... One recommendation is that security measures should be set up within apps that can distinguish between a victim-survivor using an app, and a perpetrator. This could be, for example, based on keystroke or contextual cues (see Freed et al, 2018). Freed et al also illustrate further security mechanisms, such as the app having a quick exit button, and data being deleted if the password is entered incorrectly. ...
This Open Space piece discusses the implementation of a chatbot for victim-survivors who are subjected to domestic abuse. Being deployed as part of the ISEDA project (Innovative Solutions to Eliminate Domestic Abuse), a Horizon Europe project involving 15 partners from nine European countries, the chatbot will aim to provide women who are subjected to domestic abuse with information about domestic abuse, local support services, links to emergency services and potentially act as a place to store evidence that can be used in court. We discuss the ethical considerations surrounding the implementation of the chatbot within the project, and use of technology to support women within the domestic abuse sector in general. We highlight some of the positives alongside pitfalls of this way of working, and outline some of the considerations surrounding longevity of the chatbot in light of empowering under-funded women’s services.
... Wong and Mulligan describe how much of HCI research frames privacy as a technical problem that can be solved through design solutions such as encryption or data architecture; or frames privacy as an informational problem which requires the re-design of notices and other informational content to assist users' decision-making [119]. McDonald and Forte suggest that HCI would benefit by expanding its conceptions of privacy to focus on vulnerabilities from feminist and queer perspectives [73], building on other research identifying how people's experiences of privacy can vary with their social power positions [44,72]. This paper similarly suggests that HCI can usefully expand its conceptions of privacy, but by considering a broader network of interconnected social values. ...
We use a design workbook of speculative scenarios as a values elicitation activity with 14 participants. The workbook depicts use case scenarios with smart home camera technologies that involve surveillance and uneven power relations. The scenarios were initially designed by the researchers to explore scenarios of privacy and surveillance within three social relationships involving "primary" and "non-primary" users: Parents-Children, Landlords-Tenants, and Residents-Domestic Workers. When the scenarios were utilized as part of a values elicitation activity with participants, we found that they reflected on a broader set of interconnected social values beyond privacy and surveillance, including autonomy and agency, physical safety, property rights, trust and accountability, and fairness. The paper suggests that future research about ethical issues in smart homes should conceptualize privacy as interconnected with a broader set of social values (which can align or be in tension with privacy), and reflects on considerations for doing research with non-primary users.
... Suspicious partners sometimes surveil their lovers to verify fidelity (e.g., reviewing text messages, installing spyware on a cellphone). This can escalate to harassment, doxxing, or physical violence (Freed et al., 2018). High-tech surveillance echoes abusers' analog techniques, like opening mail or checking a car's gas levels (Bancroft, 2002). ...
Social media have changed the ways we communicate, meet others, and form intimate relationships. However, technology can also mediate intimate partner surveillance and abuse (Muise, 2009; Tokunaga, 2010). One of the most explicit ways to understand these shifts is through the transgressing of relationship boundaries, defined and enforced by settler-colonial notions of compulsory monogamy (TallBear, 2020). Anxieties around cheating have evolved along with our technologies, as evidenced by ambiguous new terms like “microcheating” and “emotional cheating” (Lusinski, 2018). In this in-progress, mixed-methods study, we examine new definitions of cheating through analyzing discussions about potential transgressions on Reddit. Specifically, we investigate 1) which behaviors cause uncertainty in emerging forms of social media-enabled infidelity and 2) the degree to which relationship discourse online naturalizes the extension of compulsory monogamy into online space. For our pilot analysis, we used computational techniques to elicit common subjects within subreddit posts to then analyze qualitatively. We began with Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), an unsupervised natural language processing tool, to organize Reddit posts and comments by topic (Blei, 2012). Then we qualitatively analyzed Reddit discourse by using critical discourse analysis. Our pilot analysis suggested a belief that proof of (in)fidelity can be found on a partner’s smartphone, such as by reading texts. This orientation toward evidence then justifies surveillance and hacking of a partner’s phone and computer presence, construing the invasion of privacy as the right to truth. This preliminary finding suggests that discourse around transgressive behaviors on social media likely reiterates compulsory monogamy and settler sexuality.
... These included measures of physical violence (e.g., "slapped, pushed, or shoved you" "choked, strangled, or tried to suffocate you," "threatened to use a weapon against you"), psychological violence (e.g., "tried to keep you from talking to friends or family" or" told you were a loser or not good enough"), and sexual violence (e.g., "physically forced you to have sexual intercourse or do something sexual when you did not want to?"). Technology-facilitated IPV was assessed with four items from the Cyber Aggression in Relationships Scale (Watkins et al., 2018), and one item adapted from Freed et al. (2018) (e.g., "used technology and/or social media to harass, impersonate, intimidate or threaten you"; "used mobile technology and/or GPS to track your location without your permission"; and shared private or embarrassing photos and/or videos of you without your permission"). ...
This study explores formal and informal intimate partner violence (IPV) service use among women and transgender/nonbinary individuals in the state of Michigan during the COVID-19 pandemic. A total of 14.8% (N = 173) of participants experienced IPV during this period, and 70% utilized at least one formal IPV service (13.3%). Up to 22% of survivors reported wanting to seek formal help but not doing so due to fear of partner reprisal, contracting COVID-19, or COVID-related service reductions. White, pregnant, and part-time-employed survivors were most likely to seek informal help. Older, higher-income, white, part-time-employed, pregnant, and non-essential worker survivors were most likely to seek formal help.
... Finally, only around half of the GBVxTech we reviewed incorporated at least one security feature. This raises major ethical and safety concerns, particularly in cases where victims are reporting intimate partner violence when a partner could easily access their mobile phone or computer and retaliate (Freed et al., 2018). Therefore, security options (e.g., passwords or 'quick escapes') should be implemented in every app or website created for the purpose of documenting GBV incidents. ...
Introduction
Gender-based violence (GBV) is under-reported to the authorities owing to the stigma, shame, and fear of reprisal that surrounds these crimes. To address this, there has been an influx of technologies, including mobile phone and online applications that allow victim-survivors (hereafter, victims) to document and report GBV (hereafter referred to as GBVxTech). We critically analysed the extent to which GBVxTech applications align with the scientific knowledge base on gathering accounts of crimes from victims and witnesses.
Methods
We identified 41 reporting and evidence building applications from around the world but found many (n = 19) were no longer accessible. A total of 13 applications met the study criteria and were available for download. We evaluated each application on how well its design and features align with established minimum best practice standards for gathering complete and accurate accounts from witnesses and victims, such as the pre-interview instructions (e.g., setting ground rules), questioning approach (e.g., using open-ended questions), and the adequacy of security features (e.g., password protection).
Results and Discussion
We found most applications employ open questions, encourage victims to report information in an independent voice, and seek to elicit information pertinent to a criminal investigation. None of the applications use leading questions. However, most applications do not establish ground rules, and many use forced-choice questions, do not time stamp the information gathered, or document when users change their answers. Many applications have limited security features, potentially compromising users’ safety. Further, some applications do not provide information about how to use the app, an informed consent procedure, or data usage information. We discuss the findings and offer recommendations for future GBVxTech development.
... [39][40][41][42] Other studies on technology-facilitated IPV note that cybersecurity experts have traditionally ignored gender and failed to provide comprehensive prevention measures to IPV survivors. 32,[43][44][45][46][47] This places the burden of digital security protection on survivors themselves. 30 Concepts of suturalante and jappalante challenge this burden. ...
The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the harm reduction potential of virtual sex work (VSW) such as video or audio calls with clients. VSW limits exposure to COVID-19 and STIs. However, sex workers using digital technologies face high risks of technology-facilitated intimate partner violence (IPV), such as non-consensual distribution of intimate images. This study explored perceived risks and benefits of VSW, including the salience of STI harm reduction. Ethnographic interviews and participant observation with self-identified cis women sex workers in Dakar between January 2018 and August 2019 informed a further period of focused data collection in June 2022, in which two key research participants and the author devised a goal of concrete community benefit: a list of contextually relevant digital privacy precautions and resources. Brainstorming this list during workshops with 18 sex workers provided prompts for participant perspectives. While participants generally preferred VSW, citing STI prevention as a key reason, most resumed in-person sex work after COVID-19 curfews lifted; social risks of digital privacy breach and potential outing outweighed physical risks of contracting STIs. Participants proposed privacy features for mobile applications to make VSW viable and benefit from STI prevention. Their reflections call on tech companies to embed values of informed consent and privacy into platform design, shifting the burden of protecting privacy from individuals to companies. This study addresses a gap in technology-facilitated IPV research, which has concentrated on Euro-American contexts. Participant perspectives can inform action in technology policy sectors to advance criminalised communities' rights to sexual health, privacy, and autonomy.
Methods of domestic abuse are progressively incorporating computer misuse and other related online offences and digital tools, escalating opportunities for perpetrators to monitor, threaten and humiliate their victims. Drawing on empirical research involving media case study analysis, a technology review and interviews undertaken with 21 professionals and service providers supporting domestic abuse victims, this article outlines the context in England and Wales regarding the methods, tools and criminal justice responses involved in what we conceptualise as the technification of domestic abuse. As technology continues to deeply intertwine with our daily lives, it is undeniable that its involvement within domestic abuse encompasses harmful behaviours that pose an increasing risk of harm, and unless effective criminal justice interventions are implemented, this risk will inevitably grow even further.
The proliferation of Generative Artificial Intelligence (Generative AI) has led to an increased reliance on AI‐generated content for designing and deploying digital health interventions. While generative AI has the potential to facilitate and automate healthcare, there are concerns that AI‐generated content and AI‐generated health advice could trigger, perpetuate, or exacerbate prior traumatic experiences among vulnerable populations. In this discussion article, I examined how generative‐AI‐powered digital health interventions could trigger, perpetuate, or exacerbate emotional trauma among vulnerable populations who rely on digital health interventions as complementary or alternative sources of seeking health services or information. I then proposed actionable strategies for mitigating AI‐generated trauma in the context of digital health interventions. The arguments raised in this article are expected to shift the focus of AI practitioners against prioritizing dominant narratives in AI algorithms into seriously considering the needs of vulnerable minority groups who are at the greatest risk for trauma but are often invisible in AI data sets, AI algorithms, and their resultant technologies.
The landscape of digital privacy risks faced by individuals seeking abortions has grown increasingly complex following the overturn of Roe v. Wade. Reproductive healthcare providers are uniquely positioned to offer critical privacy guidance. We conducted interviews with 22 reproductive healthcare providers across the U.S. to explore their perceptions of privacy threats for abortion-seeking patients and the types of guidance they provide. Our findings show that providers are most concerned about privacy risks for vulnerable patients—minors, individuals seeking gender-affirming care, and those in abusive relationships—particularly regarding information that could be intercepted by people close to them, such as partners or relatives. However, providers generally do not perceive government surveillance or hostile actors as major threats to abortion-seeking patients. We conclude with an updated notion of informed consent and preliminary recommendations for ways healthcare providers can revise their threat models to better support the privacy of abortion-seeking patients.
People are increasingly introduced to each other offline thanks to online platforms that make algorithmically-mediated introductions between their users. Such platforms include dating apps (e.g., Tinder) and in-person gig work websites (e.g., TaskRabbit, Care.com). Protecting the users of these online-offline systems requires answering calls from prior work to consider 'post-digital' orientations of safety: shifting from traditional technological security thinking to consider algorithm-driven consequences that emerge throughout online and offline contexts rather than solely acknowledging online threats. To support post-digital safety in platforms that make algorithmically-mediated offline introductions (AMOIs), we apply a mixed-methods approach to identify the core harms that AMOI users experience, the protective safety behaviors they employ, and the prevalence of those behaviors. First, we systematically review existing work (n=93), synthesizing the harms that threaten AMOIs and the protective behaviors people employ to combat these harms. Second, we validate prior work and fill gaps left by primarily qualitative inquiry through a survey of respondents' definitions of safety in AMOI and the prevalence and implementation of their protective behaviors. We focus on two exemplar populations who engage in AMOIs: online daters (n=476) and in-person gig workers (n=451). We draw on our systematization and prevalence data to identify several directions for designers and researchers to reimagine defensive tools to support safety in AMOIs.
Domestic violence (DV) survivors from marginalized communities face serious challenges when seeking governmental services and community resources. Current resources often overlook victim-survivors' needs, neglecting their choices and autonomy. Through studying the context of DV within the US-based Muslim community and embracing a Survivor-Centered Transformative Justice approach, we introduce healing structures, structures promoting justice for victim-survivors and their communities, where healing is promoted by tackling harmful practices and discriminatory laws and fostering collective and survivor-centered interventions. Through focus groups, design concepts, and expert evaluations, we unveil three sociotechnical processes that establish healing structures for survivors and their communities when implemented collectively and simultaneously. The processes are: 1) Survivor advocacy, ensuring safety, empowerment, informed decision-making, and care continuity. 2) Community accountability, encouraging reparation and behavioral change of abusers through communal intervention and support. 3) Institutional transformation, reshaping broader conditions perpetuating abuse through preventive measures and structural reform. We conclude by reflecting on healing structures and discussing their design implications and potential tensions.
Non-consensual intimate media (NCIM) involves sharing intimate content without the depicted person's consent, including 'revenge porn' and sexually explicit deepfakes. While NCIM has received attention in legal, psychological, and communication fields over the past decade, it is not sufficiently addressed in computing scholarship. This paper addresses this gap by linking NCIM harms to the specific technological components that facilitate them. We introduce the sociotechnical stack , a conceptual framework designed to map the technical stack to its corresponding social impacts. The sociotechnical stack allows us to analyze sociotechnical problems like NCIM, and points toward opportunities for computing research. We propose a research roadmap for computing and social computing communities to deter NCIM perpetration and support victim-survivors through building and rebuilding technologies.
The mass collection and reuse of social data requires a reimagining of privacy and consent, with particular attention to the (in)equitable distribution of benefits and burdens between researchers and subjects. Instrumenting frontline clinical services to collect and steward data might mitigate the exploitation inherent to data collection---with attention to how subjects can meaningfully participate in stewardship. We explore participatory data stewardship in the context of clinical computer security for survivors of intimate partner violence (IPV). Via semi-structured interviews with IPV support workers, we explore how data are produced within the IPV care ecosystem at the Clinic to End Tech Abuse (CETA). We then conduct design provocations with clients of IPV services and their support workers, exploring possibilities for participatory data mechanisms like open records and dynamic consent. We find participation in data stewardship may benefit clients through improved agency, self-reflection, and control of self-narrative, and that incurred burdens may be alleviated by enlisting trusted stewards. We close with future work for CSCW interrogating how knowledge of digital-safety harms can and should be produced from clinical encounters, towards more equitable ways of knowing.
Inaccurate assumptions about people who abuse technology can inhibit effective socio-technical interventions for at-risk populations, including IPV survivors. Our study aims to rectify this concerning oversight through a synthesis of seven research projects on how 152 abusive partners (APs) discuss and understand their malicious use of technology in face-to-face interactions. AP accounts about technology abuse are rich sources of insight into technology abuse, but demonstrate a heterogeneity of awareness of, choice to use, and ability to desist from participating in technology abuse. To ensure immediate practical benefits for practitioner communities, we also engaged 20 facilitators of abusive partner intervention programs (APIPs) in focused group discussions to identify potential solutions for addressing technology abuse in their programming. Findings reveal that facilitators grapple with a complex set of challenges, stemming from the concern about teaching APs new abusive techniques in-session, and lacking professional tools to investigate, evaluate, and resolve technology abuse attacks. Our work provides valuable insights into addressing technology abuse in the APIP ecosystem, offering targeted lessons for the CSCW community and stakeholders in violence prevention.
Transformative media fandom is a remarkably coherent, long-lived, and diverse community united primarily by shared engagement in the varied activities of fandom. Its social norms are highly-developed and frequently debated, and have been studied by the CSCW and Media Studies communities in the past, but rarely using the tools and theories of privacy, despite fannish norms often bearing strongly on privacy. We use privacy scholarship and existing theories thereof to examine these norms and bring an additional perspective to understanding fandom communities. In this work, we analyze over 250,000 words of "meta'' essays and comments on those essays, reflecting the views and debates of hundreds of fans on these privacy norms. Drawing on Solove's theory of privacy as an aggregation of different ideas and on a variety of other academic theories of privacy, we analyze these norms as highly effective at protecting the integrity of fannish activities. We then articulate the value of studying these sorts of diverse "activity-defined'' communities, arguing that such approaches grant us greater power to understand privacy experiences in ways that are specific, contextual, and intersectional yet still generalizable where possible.
Research involving sensitive data often leads to valuable human-centered insights. Yet, the effects of participating in and conducting research about sensitive data with youth are poorly understood. We conducted meta-level research to improve our understanding of these effects. We did the following: (i) asked youth (aged 13-21) to share their private Instagram Direct Messages (DMs) and flag their unsafe DMs; (ii) interviewed 30 participants about the experience of reflecting on this sensitive data; (iii) interviewed research assistants (RAs, n=12) about their experience analyzing youth's data. We found that reflecting about DMs brought discomfort for participants and RAs, although both benefited from increasing their awareness about online risks, their behavior, and privacy and social media practices. Participants had high expectations for safeguarding their private data while their concerns were mitigated by the potential to improve online safety. We provide implications for ethical research practices and the development of reflective practices among participants and RAs through applying trauma-informed principles to HCI research.
Current computing device authentication often presents accessibility barriers for people with upper extremity impairments (UEI). In this paper, we present a framework called Accessible image-Association-based Authentication for Computing-devices (A3C) , a novel recognition-based graphical authentication framework specifically designed for people with UEI to authenticate to their computing devices. A3C requires users to provide a set of primary images that the user knows that are recognizable to them and subsequently associate each primary image with a secondary image. To evaluate the efficacy of the A3C framework, we instantiated the framework by implementing a version of A3C called A3C-FA , which uses images of faces of people the user knows as the primary image and animal images as the secondary image. We then performed three studies to evaluate A3C-FA: a shoulder-surfing attack study ( N=319 ), a close-adversary attack study ( N=268 ), and a usability study with people with UEI ( N=14 ). We found that A3C was robust against both shoulder-surfing and close-adversary attacks. We also performed a detailed study to evaluate the accessibility of A3C-FA. Our participants reported that A3C-FA was more usable and more secure than the authentication approaches with which they were familiar. Based on these findings, we suggest four areas of future research to further improve the design of A3C framework.
A wide variety of literature exists on privacy across different communities and disciplines, including Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). Privacy literature is also scattered within HCI, considering that HCI has evolved from its origins to include a variety of disciplines. Therefore, this section is not intended to provide an exhaustive list of HCI privacy literature references. We explored the literature on usable privacy with a focus on the interaction and usability pillars of HCI, using the definition of usable privacy. Our search was narrowed to publications in reputed and high-quality journals and venues within and related to the privacy and security research field to categorise major themes and trends. Various themes are discussed in this section, including usable privacy research in the Internet of Things (IoT), inclusive privacy, usable privacy for developers, usable privacy for Privacy-Enhancing Technologies (PETs), visual privacy, and efforts to help people make better privacy decisions with usable privacy notices and choices. For each theme, we discuss pertinent literature and complete our discussion with existing problems, gaps, and future directions.
This chapter aims to address aspects related to the educational support needed to face sexual abuse (SA) and sexual violence (SV). Such support is of crucial importance not only to the survivors, but also to their families, social networks, and healthcare professionals, so as to avoid secondary and projective victimization.
Wykorzystanie teleopieki w przeciwdziałaniu przemocy domowej i poseparacyjnej, choć ma miejsce, to nadal pozostaje mało rozpoznane i rozpowszechnione. Dotychczasowe badania pokazują, że teleopieka, choć nie jest panaceum na problem przemocy, może pomóc w podniesieniu poczucia bezpieczeństwa u osób jej doznających, bądź narażonych na nią (przemoc poseparacyjna). W tym tekście analizuje się te badania w celu odkrycia zarówno potencjału, jak i słabych stron teleopieki stosowanej w obszarze przeciwdziałania przemocy oraz określenia warunków wzmacniających jej skuteczność. W podsumowaniu, autorzy zaproponowali wstępne, ramowe rekomendacje dotyczące warunków opracowania ram metodycznych dla wdrażania modelu teleopieki w tym obszarze pracy socjalnej i pomocy społecznej. Opracowanie takiego modelu będzie wymagało przeprowadzenia badań społecznych o charakterze interdyscyplinarnym, które dostarczą danych niezbędnych do dokonania analiz i zaproponowania konkretnych rozwiązań w wymiarze nie tylko technologicznym i organizacyjnym, ale także metodycznym, edukacyjnym i prawnym.
The article examines the deepening crisis in the treatment of women and girls by the legal/criminal justice system – as the legal and policy architecture that has long failed to deliver equal access to justice for victims of gender-based violence is confronted with new and altered forms of perpetration. Cautioning against a singular reliance on the law to prevent and respond to technology-facilitated coercive control, the authors contend that piecemeal law reform diverts much needed attention from the broader social and legal reforms needed to ensure equal and safe access to justice for victim-survivors of all forms of gender-based violence, including those forms perpetrated via technology. Through case and legislative analyses, the authors note that efforts to redress the harms of technology-facilitated gender-based violence must be alert to the risks of reactive legislation, discrimination, net-widening and overcriminalisation, victim blaming, systems abuse, and, in some cases, a further loss of autonomy, legal agency, and personhood for victim-survivors. The article concludes by arguing for a dismantling of the structural violence that pervades both the field of digital technology and the criminal justice sector, to avert the continued development, application, and weaponization of new technologies as instruments of misogynist abuse.
A number of technology companies have introduced personal item tracking devices to allow people to locate and keep track of items such as keys and phones. However, these devices are not always used for their intended purpose: they have been used in cases of domestic abuse and stalking to track others without their consent. In response, manufacturers introduced a range of anti-stalking features designed to detect and mitigate misuse of their products. In this paper, we explore common implementations of these anti-stalking features and analyse their limitations. In other research, we identified that very few people use anti-stalking features, even when they know that someone might be tracking them and are incentivised to evade them. In this paper, we additionally identify several failures of the features that prevent them from performing their intended purpose even if they were in use. It is impossible for anti-stalking features to identify the difference between ‘bad’ tracking and ‘good’ tracking. Furthermore, some features work on some types of phones for some types of tracking devices, but not all work on all phones for all trackers. Some anti-stalking features are not enabled by default, and some require manual intervention to scan for devices. We provide suggestions for how these features could be improved, as well as ideas for additional anti-stalking features that could help mitigate the issues discussed in this paper.
Two-factor authentication (TFA) provides an additional layer of protection to commonly-occurring password breaches. However, existing TFA methods, often involve special hardware interfaces, or require human effort which is prone to errors and acts as an adoption detractor for older adults and novice technology users. To address these limitations, we propose a zero-interaction, two-factor authentication (ZITA) protocol. In ZITA, the first factor is implemented using the conventional username and password methods. The second factor is completed without any human effort provided that the user is not accessing the service from an unregistered public device and a designated secondary device is physically co-present. To automate the second factor, ZITA exploits the long-term contact between the login device and the secondary device such as a smartphone. Moreover, to thwart man-in-the-middle and co-located attacks, ZITA incorporates a proximity verification test that relies on the randomness of ambient RF signals. Compared with other zero-effort TFA protocols, ZITA remains secure against advanced threats and does not require out-of-band sensors such as microphones, speakers, or photoplethysmography (PPG) sensors.
The popularity, availability, and ubiquity of information and communication technologies create new opportunities for online harassment. The present study evaluates factors associated with young adult women's online harassment experiences through a multi-factor measure accounting for the frequency and severity of negative events. Findings from a survey of 659 undergraduate and graduate students highlight the relationship between harassment, well-being, and engagement in strategies to manage one's online identity. We further identify differences in harassment experiences across three popular social media platforms: Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. We conclude by discussing this study's contribution to feminist theory and describing five potential design interventions derived from our data that may minimize these negative experiences, mitigate the psychological harm they cause, and provide women with more proactive ways to regain agency when using communication technologies.
Objectives
Approaches to measuring intimate partner violence (IPV) in populations often privilege physical violence, with poor assessment of other experiences. This has led to underestimating the scope and impact of IPV. The aim of this study was to develop a brief, reliable and valid self-report measure of IPV that adequately captures its complexity.
Design
Mixed-methods instrument development and psychometric testing to evolve a brief version of the Composite Abuse Scale (CAS) using secondary data analysis and expert feedback.
Setting
Data from 5 Canadian IPV studies; feedback from international IPV experts.
Participants
31 international IPV experts including academic researchers, service providers and policy actors rated CAS items via an online survey. Pooled data from 6278 adult Canadian women were used for scale development.
Primary/secondary outcome measures
Scale reliability and validity; robustness of subscales assessing different IPV experiences.
Results
A 15-item version of the CAS has been developed (Composite Abuse Scale (Revised)—Short Form, CASR-SF), including 12 items developed from the original CAS and 3 items suggested through expert consultation and the evolving literature. Items cover 3 abuse domains: physical, sexual and psychological, with questions asked to assess lifetime, recent and current exposure, and abuse frequency. Factor loadings for the final 3-factor solution ranged from 0.81 to 0.91 for the 6 psychological abuse items, 0.63 to 0.92 for the 4 physical abuse items, and 0.85 and 0.93 for the 2 sexual abuse items. Moderate correlations were observed between the CASR-SF and measures of depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and coercive control. Internal consistency of the CASR-SF was 0.942. These reliability and validity estimates were comparable to those obtained for the original 30-item CAS.
Conclusions
The CASR-SF is brief self-report measure of IPV experiences among women that has demonstrated initial reliability and validity and is suitable for use in population studies or other studies. Additional validation of the 15-item scale with diverse samples is required.
Doxing is the intentional public release onto the Internet of personal information about an individual by a third party, often with the intent to humiliate, threaten, intimidate, or punish the identified individual. In this paper I present a conceptual analysis of the practice of doxing and how it differs from other forms of privacy violation. I distinguish between three types of doxing: deanonymizing doxing, where personal information establishing the identity of a formerly anonymous individual is released; targeting doxing, that discloses personal information that reveals specific details of an individual’s circumstances that are usually private, obscure, or obfuscated; and delegitimizing doxing, which reveals intimate personal information that damages the credibility of that individual. I also describe how doxing differs from blackmail and defamation. I argue that doxing may be justified in cases where it reveals wrongdoing (such as deception), but only if the information released is necessary to reveal that such wrongdoing has occurred and if it is in the public interest to reveal such wrongdoing. Revealing additional information, such as that which allows an individual to be targeted for harassment and intimidation, is unjustified. I illustrate my discussion with the examples of the alleged identification of the creator of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto, by Newsweek magazine, the identification of the notorious Reddit user Violentacrez by the blog Gawker, and the harassment of game developer Zoe Quinn in the ‘GamerGate’ Internet campaign.
While social media platforms enable individuals to easily communicate and share experiences, they have also emerged as a tool for cyberbullying. Teenagers represent an especially vulnerable population for negative emotional responses to cyberbullying. At the same time, attempts to mitigate or prevent cyberbullying from occurring in these networked spaces have largely failed because of the complexity and nuance with which young people bully others online. To address challenges related to designing for cyberbullying intervention and mitigation, we detail findings from participatory design work with two groups of high school students in spring 2015. Over the course of five design sessions spanning five weeks, participants shared their experiences with cyberbullying and iteratively designed potential solutions. We provide an in-depth discussion of the range of cyberbullying mitigation solutions participants designed. We focus on challenges participants' identified in designing for cyberbullying support and prevention and present a set of five potential cyberbullying mitigation solutions based on the results of the design sessions.
The killing of a satellite-tagged male lion by a trophy hunter in Zimbabwe in July 2015 provoked an unprecedented media reaction. We analyse the global media response to the trophy hunting of the lion, nicknamed "Cecil", a study animal in a long-term project run by Oxford University's Wildlife Conservation Research Unit (WildCRU). We collaborated with a media-monitoring company to investigate the development of the media coverage spatially and temporally. Relevant articles were identified using a Boolean search for the terms Cecil AND lion in 127 languages. Stories about Cecil the Lion in the editorial media increased from approximately 15 per day to nearly 12,000 at its peak, and mentions of Cecil the Lion in social media reached 87,533 at its peak. We found that, while there were clear regional differences in the level of media saturation of the Cecil story, the patterns of the development of the coverage of this story were remarkably similar across the globe, and that there was no evidence of a lag between the social media and the editorial media. Further, all the main social media platforms appeared to react in synchrony. This story appears to have spread synchronously across media channels and geographically across the globe over the span of about two days. For lion conservation in particular, and perhaps for wildlife conservation more generally, we speculate that the atmosphere may have been changed significantly. We consider the possible reasons why this incident provoked a reaction unprecedented in the conservation sector.
Online harassment is a continuing problem, endemic to many social media platforms and other means of web-based communications, and few means exist to analyze web content for instances of verbal violence and aggression. We are developing a scale of online aggression that can be applied to Twitter posts (tweets) and that is based on existing measures of trait aggression and cyberbullying. For the purpose of testing and validating our scale, we are relying on Mechanical Turk, an Amazon Web Service, through which we can enlist and pay workers to code our dataset of tweets. Preliminary results suggest that aggression in tweets is difficult for human coders to identify and that we have not reached consensus about what constitutes harassment online. We discuss our preliminary results and propose next steps such as scale modification and automated classifier development.
Most mobile phones and tablets support only two access control device states: locked and unlocked. We investigated how well all or-nothing device access control meets the need of users by interviewing 20 participants who had both a smartphone and tablet. We find all-or-nothing device access control to be a remarkably poor fit with users' preferences. On both phones and tablets, participants wanted roughly half their applications to be available even when their device was locked and half protected by authentication. We also solicited participants' interest in new access control mechanisms designed specifically to facilitate device sharing. Fourteen participants out of 20 preferred these controls to existing security locks alone. Finally, we gauged participants' interest in using face and voice biometrics to authenticate to their mobile phone and tablets; participants were surprisingly receptive to biometrics, given that they were also aware of security and reliability limitations.
Homicide is an important cause of premature mortality globally, but evidence for the magnitude of homicides by intimate partners is scarce and hampered by the large amount of missing information about the victim-offender relationship. The objective of the study was to estimate global and regional prevalence of intimate partner homicide.
A systematic search of five databases (Medline, Global Health, Embase, Social Policy, and Web of Science) yielded 2167 abstracts, and resulted in the inclusion of 118 full-text articles with 1122 estimates of the prevalence of intimate partner homicide after double-blind screening. All studies were included that reported the number or proportion of women or men who were murdered by an intimate partner in a country, province, or town, using an inclusive definition of an intimate partner. Additionally, a survey of official sources of 169 countries provided a further 53 estimates. We selected one estimate per country-year using a quality assessment decision algorithm. The median prevalence of intimate partner homicide was calculated by country and region overall, and for women and men separately.
Data were obtained for 66 countries. Overall 13·5% (IQR 9·2-18·2) of homicides were committed by an intimate partner, and this proportion was six times higher for female homicides than for male homicides (38·6%, 30·8-45·3, vs 6·3%, 3·1-6·3). Median percentages for all (male and female) and female intimate partner homicide were highest in high-income countries (all, 14·9%, 9·2-18·2; female homicide, 41·2%, 30·8-44·5) and in southeast Asia (18·8%, 11·3-18·8; 58·8%, 58·8-58·8). Adjustments to account for unknown victim-offender relationships generally increased the prevalence, suggesting that results presented are conservative.
At least one in seven homicides globally and more than a third of female homicides are perpetrated by an intimate partner. Such violence commonly represents the culmination of a long history of abuse. Strategies to reduce homicide risk include increased investment in intimate partner violence prevention, risk assessments at different points of care, support for women experiencing intimate partner violence, and control of gun ownership for people with a history of violence. Improvements in country-level data collection and monitoring systems are also essential, because data availability and quality varied strongly across regions.
WHO, Sigrid Rausing Trust, and the UK Economic and Social Research Council.
Data from 81 countries was used to estimate global prevalence of intimate partner violence against women.
Associations between intimate partner violence (IPV) and poor physical and mental health of women have been demonstrated in the international and national literature across numerous studies. This paper presents a review of the literature on this topic. The 75 papers included in this review cover both original research studies and those which undertook secondary analyses of primary data sources. The reviewed research papers published from 2006 to 2012 include quantitative and qualitative studies from Western and developing countries. The results show that while there is variation in prevalence of IPV across various cultural settings, IPV was associated with a range of mental health issues including depression, PTSD, anxiety, self-harm, and sleep disorders. In most studies, these effects were observed using validated measurement tools. IPV was also found to be associated with poor physical health including poor functional health, somatic disorders, chronic disorders and chronic pain, gynaecological problems, and increased risk of STIs. An increased risk of HIV was reported to be associated with a history of sexual abuse and violence. The implications of the study findings in relation to methodological issues, clinical significance, and future research direction are discussed.
Our research seeks to understand the current usability situation of email encryption software, particularly PGP 9 in comparison to previous studies of PGP 5. We designed a pilot study to find current problems in the following areas: create a key pair, get public keys, verify public keys, encrypt an email, sign an email, decrypt an email, verify a digital signature, and save a backup of public and private keys.
Mobile phones are becoming increasingly personalized in terms of the data they store and the types of services they provide. At the same time, field studies have reported that there are a variety of situations in which it is natural for people to share their phones with others. However, most mobile phones support a binary security model that offers all-or-nothing access to the phone. We interviewed 12 smartphone users to explore how security and data privacy concerns affected their willingness to share their mobile phones. The diversity of guest user categorizations and associated security constraints expressed by the participants suggests the need for a security model richer than today's binary model. Author Keywords Mobile phone sharing, phone privacy, phone security.
As digital content becomes more prevalent in the home, non-technical users are increasingly interested in sharing that content with others and accessing it from multiple devices. Not much is known about how these users think about controlling access to this data. To better understand this, we conducted semi-structured, in-situ interviews with 33 users in 15 households. We found that users create ad-hoc access-control mechanisms that do not always work; that their ideal policies are complex and multi-dimensional; that a priori policy specification is often insufficient; and that people's mental models of access control and security are often misaligned with current systems. We detail these findings and present a set of associated guidelines for designing usable access-control systems for the home environment.
Loaded with personal data, e.g. photos, contacts, and call history, mobile phones are truly personal devices. Yet it is often necessary or desirable to share our phones with others. This is especially true as mobile phones are integrating features conventionally provided by other dedicated devices, from MP3 players to games consoles. Unfortunately, when we lend our phones to others, we give away complete access because existing phones assume a single user and provide little protection for private data and applications. In this work, we present xShare, a protection solution to address this problem. xShare allows phone owners to rapidly specify what they want to share and place the phone into a restricted mode where only the data and applications intended for sharing can be accessed. We first present findings from two motivational user studies based on which we provide the design requirements of xShare. We then present the design of xShare based on file-level access control. We describe the implementation of xShare on Windows Mobile and report a comprehensive usability evaluation of the implementation, including mea-surements and user studies. The evaluation demonstrates that our xShare implementation has negligible overhead for interactive phone usage, is extremely favored by mobile users, and provides robust protection against attacks by experienced Windows Mobile users and developers.
In this paper we present Family Accounts, a new user account model for shared home computers. We conducted a study with sixteen families, eight who used individual profiles at home, and eight who shared a single profile. Our results demonstrate that Family Accounts is a good compromise between a single shared profile and individual profiles for each family member. In particular, we observed that because Family Accounts allowed individuals to switch profiles without forcing them to interrupt their tasks, family members tended to switch to their own profiles only when a task required some degree of privacy or personalization.
Logging in by typing usernames and passwords is by far the most common way to access modern computer systems. However, such
contemporary user authentication mechanisms are inappropriate in a ubiquitous computing environment, where users constantly
are accessing a wide range of different devices. This paper introduces new concepts for user authentication in ubiquitous
computing, such as the notion of proximity-based user authentication and silent login. The design of these new mechanisms is part of the design of a ubiquitous computing infrastructure for hospitals, which is
grounded in field studies of medical work in hospitals. The paper reports from field studies of clinicians using an electronic
patient record (EPR) and describes severe usability problems associated with its login procedures. The EPR’s login mechanisms
do not recognize the nature of medical work as being nomadic, interrupted, and cooperative around sharing common material.
The consequence is that login is circumvented and security is jeopardized.
When counseling women experiencing intimate partner violence (IPV), healthcare providers can benefit from understanding the factors contributing to a women's motivation to change her situation. We wished to examine the various factors and situations associated with turning points and change seeking in the IPV situation.
We performed qualitative analysis on data from 7 focus groups and 20 individual interviews with women (61 participants) with past and/or current histories of IPV.
The turning points women identified fell into 5 major themes: (1) protecting others from the abuse/abuser; (2) increased severity/humiliation with abuse; (3) increased awareness of options/access to support and resources; (4) fatigue/recognition that the abuser was not going to change; and (5) partner betrayal/infidelity.
Women experiencing IPV can identify specific factors and events constituting turning points or catalyst to change in their IPV situation. These turning points are dramatic shifts in beliefs and perceptions of themselves, their partners, and/or their situation that alter the women's willingness to tolerate the situation and motivate them to consider change. When counseling women experiencing IPV, health providers can incorporate understanding of turning points to motivate women to move forward in their process of changing their IPV situation.
This 11-city study sought to identify risk factors for femicide in abusive relationships.
Proxies of 220 intimate partner femicide victims identified from police or medical examiner records were interviewed, along with 343 abused control women.
Preincident risk factors associated in multivariate analyses with increased risk of intimate partner femicide included perpetrator's access to a gun and previous threat with a weapon, perpetrator's stepchild in the home, and estrangement, especially from a controlling partner. Never living together and prior domestic violence arrest were associated with lowered risks. Significant incident factors included the victim having left for another partner and the perpetrator's use of a gun. Other significant bivariate-level risks included stalking, forced sex, and abuse during pregnancy.
There are identifiable risk factors for intimate partner femicides.
Digital technologies, including mobile devices, cloud computing services, and social networks, play a nuanced role in intimate partner violence (IPV) settings, including domestic abuse, stalking, and surveillance of victims by abusive partners. However, the interactions among victims of IPV, abusers, law enforcement, counselors, and others --- and the roles that digital technologies play in these interactions --- are poorly understood. We present a qualitative study that analyzes the role of digital technologies in the IPV ecosystem in New York City. Findings from semi-structured interviews with 40 IPV professionals and nine focus groups with 32 survivors of IPV reveal a complex set of socio-technical challenges that stem from the intimate nature of the relationships involved and the complexities of managing shared social circles. Both IPV professionals and survivors feel that they do not possess adequate expertise to be able to identify or cope with technology-enabled IPV, and there are currently insufficient best practices to help them deal with abuse via technology. We also reveal a number of tensions and trade-offs in negotiating technology's role in social support and legal procedures. Taken together, our findings contribute a nuanced understanding of technology's role in the IPV ecosystem and yield recommendations for HCI and technology experts interested in aiding victims of abuse.
The Internet age has brought with it a slew of tools and research which allow stalkers, from ex-lovers to complete strangers, to follow a person's life in great detail without their consent. The converse side of the issue, the ability of a target to detect and track stalking behaviour, has not received nearly as much attention, with privacy and security research largely discussing other threat models. This article reviews the current literature on the subject and explores the disparity between technologies used by stalkers and technologies used against stalkers, then suggests some research avenues which may help correct this imbalance.
We present a qualitative study of the digital privacy and security motivations, practices, and challenges of survivors of intimate partner abuse (IPA). This paper provides a framework for organizing survivors' technology practices and challenges into three phases: physical control, escape, and life apart. This three-phase framework combines technology practices with three phases of abuse to provide an empirically sound method for technology creators to consider how survivors of IPA can leverage new and existing technologies. Overall, our results suggest that the usability of and control over privacy and security functions should be or continue to be high priorities for technology creators seeking ways to better support survivors of IPA.
We focus on an emerging trend in the context of domestic violence—the use of technology to facilitate stalking and other forms of abuse. Surveys with 152 domestic violence advocates and 46 victims show that technology—including phones, tablets, computers, and social networking websites—is commonly used in intimate partner stalking. Technology was used to create a sense of the perpetrator’s omnipresence, and to isolate, punish, and humiliate domestic violence victims. Perpetrators also threatened to share sexualized content online to humiliate victims. Technology-facilitated stalking needs to be treated as a serious offense, and effective practice, policy, and legal responses must be developed.
Many technologies assume a single user will use an account or device. But account and device sharing situations (when 2+ people use a single device or account) may arise during everyday life. We present results from a multiple-methods study of device and account sharing practices among household members and their relations. Among our findings are that device and account sharing was common, and mobile phones were often shared despite being considered "personal" devices. Based on our study results, we organize sharing practices into a taxonomy of six sharing types--distinct patterns of what, why, and how people shared. We also present two themes that cut across sharing types: that (1) trust in sharees and (2) convenience highly influenced sharing practices. Based on these findings, we discuss implications for study and technology design.
In our study, 68 teens spend two months reflecting on their weekly online experiences and report 207 separate risk events involving information breaches, online harassment, sexual solicitations, and exposure to explicit content. We conduct a structured, qualitative analysis to characterize the salient dimensions of their risk experiences, such as severity, level of agency, coping strategies, and whether the teens felt like the situation had been resolved. Overall, we found that teens can potentially benefit from lower risk online situations, which allow them to develop crucial interpersonal skills, such as boundary setting, conflict resolution, and empathy. We can also use the dimensions of risk described in this paper to identify potentially harmful risk trajectories before they become high-risk situations. Our end goal is to find a way to empower and protect teens so that they can benefit from online engagement.
This study seeks to understand and critique the growing online trend of “revenge porn,” or the intentional embarrassment of identifiable individuals through the posting of nude images online. This posting of intimate pictures, often done out of motives of revenge for perceived relational scorn, is enhanced by the varying levels of online anonymity. Using the theoretical framework of John Dewey's pragmatism, this study both analyzes this understudied but complex new problem precipitated by the conditions of the online self and establishes the groundwork for the use of pragmatist ethics in other areas of communication ethics.
Cyberbullying (harassment on social networks) is widely recognized as a serious social problem, especially for adolescents. It is as much a threat to the viability of online social networks for youth today as spam once was to email in the early days of the Internet. Current work to tackle this problem has involved social and psychological studies on its prevalence as well as its negative effects on adolescents. While true solutions rest on teaching youth to have healthy personal relationships, few have considered innovative design of social network software as a tool for mitigating this problem. Mitigating cyberbullying involves two key components: robust techniques for effective detection and reflective user interfaces that encourage users to reflect upon their behavior and their choices.
Spam filters have been successful by applying statistical approaches like Bayesian networks and hidden Markov models. They can, like Google’s GMail, aggregate human spam judgments because spam is sent nearly identically to many people. Bullying is more personalized, varied, and contextual. In this work, we present an approach for bullying detection based on state-of-the-art natural language processing and a common sense knowledge base, which permits recognition over a broad spectrum of topics in everyday life. We analyze a more narrow range of particular subject matter associated with bullying (e.g. appearance, intelligence, racial and ethnic slurs, social acceptance, and rejection), and construct BullySpace, a common sense knowledge base that encodes particular knowledge about bullying situations. We then perform joint reasoning with common sense knowledge about a wide range of everyday life topics. We analyze messages using our novel AnalogySpace common sense reasoning technique. We also take into account social network analysis and other factors. We evaluate the model on real-world instances that have been reported by users on Formspring, a social networking website that is popular with teenagers.
On the intervention side, we explore a set of reflective user-interaction paradigms with the goal of promoting empathy among social network participants. We propose an “air traffic control”-like dashboard, which alerts moderators to large-scale outbreaks that appear to be escalating or spreading and helps them prioritize the current deluge of user complaints. For potential victims, we provide educational material that informs them about how to cope with the situation, and connects them with emotional support from others. A user evaluation shows that in-context, targeted, and dynamic help during cyberbullying situations fosters end-user reflection that promotes better coping strategies.
Data confidentiality can be effectively preserved through encryption. In certain situations, this is inadequate, as users may be coerced into disclosing their decryption keys. Steganographic techniques and deniable encryption algorithms have been devised to hide the very existence of encrypted data. We examine the feasibility and efficacy of deniable encryption for mobile devices. To address obstacles that can compromise plausibly deniable encryption (PDE) in a mobile environment, we design a system called Mobiflage. Mobiflage enables PDE on mobile devices by hiding encrypted volumes within random data in a devices free storage space. We leverage lessons learned from deniable encryption in the desktop environment, and design new countermeasures for threats specific to mobile systems. We provide two implementations for the Android OS, to assess the feasibility and performance of Mobiflage on different hardware profiles. MF-SD is designed for use on devices with FAT32 removable SD cards. Our MF-MTP variant supports devices that instead share a single internal partition for both apps and user accessible data. MF-MTP leverages certain Ext4 file system mechanisms and uses an adjusted data-block allocator. These new techniques for soring hidden volumes in Ext4 file systems can also be applied to other file systems to enable deniable encryption for desktop OSes and other mobile platforms.
Suggests the construct of learned helplessness (LH) as a psychological rationale for why battered women become victims. Published literature and the author's clinical experiences in the US and Great Britain provide material for analysis and treatment recommendations. The LH theory has 3 basic components: (a) information about what should happen (the contingency), (b) cognitive representation about the contingency, and (c) behavior. It is suggested that the sex-role socialization process may be responsible for the LH behavior seen in adult women, specifically battered women. The LH theory proposes that the only successful treatment to reverse the cognitive, emotional, and motivational deficits is to learn under which conditions responses will be effective in producing results. The existence of a 3-phase cycle of violence has been isolated from the stories of battered women: tension-building, explosion of acute battering incidents, and calm, loving respite. The phases vary in time and intensity both within the same couple and between different couples. (33 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Technology has led to tremendous advancements in our society but has also brought more danger to victims of stalking and given more tools for stalkers to use. New technology has made it more difficult for prosecutors and judges to hold stalkers accountable for their crimes, and without an understanding of how technology is misused by stalkers to track and monitor their victims, many victims don't get the justice they deserve. This article addresses the tremendous impact of technology on stalking, especially within the context of intimate partner stalking.
Domestic technologies have been a popular area of study for ubiquitous computing researchers, however there is relatively little recent data on how families currently use and share technologies in domestic environments. This paper presents results from an empirical study of 15 families in the U.S in early 2007. We examined the types of technologies families own, including TVs, music players, phones and computers; where they were situated within the home; and the degree of shared ownership and use. Our results call attention to the prevalence of shared usage of technology in domestic environments and also suggest opportunistic spaces for ubiquitous computing technology. While not all ubiquitous computing technologies for domestic environments will be shared, the diverse ways families chose to share their computers suggest that future devices might better match how families wish to use shared technology by supporting both the shared usage model of appliances and the ability to access a personal profile.
Due to increased input and output capabilities, mobile phones hold many different kinds of (mostly private) data. The need
for finer grained profiles and integrated data security on mobile phones has already been documented extensively (e.g. [1]).
However, there are no appropriate concepts and implementations yet to handle and limit access to data on mobile phones. TreasurePhone
has been designed to address this specific problem. It protects the users’ mobile phone data based on their current context.
Privacy protection is realized by spheres, which represent the users’ context-specific need for privacy. That is, users can define which data and services are accessible
in which sphere. TreasurePhone exploits context information to support authentication and automatic activation of spheres
by locations and actions. We conducted a user study with 20 participants to gain insights on how well users accept such a concept. One of the main
goals was to find out whether such privacy features are appreciated by the users even though they make interaction slower
and might hinder fast access to specific data. Additionally, we showed that integration of context information significantly
increases ease-of-use of the system.
Physical violence against women is pervasive through out the world and domestic violence has been a longstanding issue in
feminist activism and research. Yet, these experiences are often not represented in technological research or design. In the
move to consider HCI at the margins, in this paper, we ask: how have ICTs affected the experiences of domestic violence survivors?
We interviewed female survivors living in a domestic violence shelter about their experiences with technology. Participants
reported that they were harassed with mobile phones, experienced additional harassment (but also support) via social networking
sites, and tried to resist using their knowledge of security and privacy.
Usability specialists were better than non-specialists at performing heuristic evaluation, and “double experts” with specific expertise in the kind of interface being evaluated performed even better. Major usability problems have a higher probability than minor problems of being found in a heuristic evaluation, but more minor problems are found in absolute numbers. Usability heuristics relating to exits and user errors were more difficult to apply than the rest, and additional measures should be taken to find problems relating to these heuristics. Usability problems that relate to missing interface elements that ought to be introduced were more difficult to find by heuristic evaluation in interfaces implemented as paper prototypes but were as easy as other problems to find in running systems.
Intimate partner violence (IPV) screening remains controversial. Major medical organizations mandate screening, whereas the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) cautions that there is insufficient evidence to recommend for or against screening. An effective IPV screening program must include a screening tool with sound psychometric properties. A systematic review was conducted to summarize IPV screening tools tested in healthcare settings, providing a discussion of existing psychometric data and an assessment of study quality.
From the end of 2007 through 2008, three published literature databases were searched from their start through December 2007; this search was augmented with a bibliography search and expert consultation. Eligible studies included English-language publications describing the psychometric testing of an IPV screening tool in a healthcare setting. Study quality was judged using USPSTF criteria for diagnostic studies.
Of 210 potentially eligible studies, 33 met inclusion criteria. The most studied tools were the Hurt, Insult, Threaten, and Scream (HITS, sensitivity 30%-100%, specificity 86%-99%); the Woman Abuse Screening Tool (WAST, sensitivity 47%, specificity 96%); the Partner Violence Screen (PVS, sensitivity 35%-71%, specificity 80%-94%); and the Abuse Assessment Screen (AAS, sensitivity 93%-94%, specificity 55%-99%). Internal reliability (HITS, WAST); test-retest reliability (AAS); concurrent validity (HITS, WAST); discriminant validity (WAST); and predictive validity (PVS) were also assessed. Overall study quality was fair to good.
No single IPV screening tool had well-established psychometric properties. Even the most common tools were evaluated in only a small number of studies. Sensitivities and specificities varied widely within and between screening tools. Further testing and validation are critically needed.
This research note describes the use of a broad range of technologies in intimate partner stalking, including cordless and cellular telephones, fax machines, e-mail, Internet-based harassment, global positioning systems, spy ware, video cameras, and online databases. The concept of "stalking with technology" is reviewed, and the need for an expanded definition of cyberstalking is presented. Legal issues and advocacy-centered responses, including training, legal remedies, public policy issues, and technology industry practices, are discussed.
. Cryptographic file systems provide little protection against legal or illegal instruments that force the owner of data to release decryption keys for stored data once the presence of encrypted data on an inspected computer has been established. We are interested in how cryptographic file systems can be extended to provide additional protection for such a scenario and we have extended the standard Linux file system (Ext2fs) with a plausible-deniability encryption function. Even though it is obvious that our computer has harddisk encryption software installed and might contain some encrypted data, an inspector will not be able to determine whether we have revealed the access keys to all security levels or only those to a few selected ones. We describe the design of our freely available implementation of this steganographic file system and discuss its security and performance characteristics. 1 Introduction Various implementations of cryptographic file systems have been ma...
User errors cause or contribute to most computer security failures, yet user interfaces for security still tend to be clumsy, confusing, or near-nonexistent. Is this simply due to a failure to apply standard user interface design techniques to security? We argue that, on the contrary, effective security requires a different usability standard, and that it will not be achieved through the user interface design techniques appropriate to other types of consumer software. To test this hypothesis, we performed a case study of a security program which does have a good user interface by general standards: PGP 5.0. Our case study used a cognitive walkthrough analysis together with a laboratory user test to evaluate whether PGP 5.0 can be successfully used by cryptography novices to achieve effective electronic mail security. The analysis found a number of user interface design flaws that may contribute to security failures, and the user test demonstrated that when our test participants were g...
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