Sunny Consolvo’s research while affiliated with Google Inc. and other places

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Publications (121)


Strategies attempted before posting on Reddit.
Understanding Help-Seeking and Help-Giving on Social Media for Image-Based Sexual Abuse
  • Preprint
  • File available

June 2024

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89 Reads

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Sunny Consolvo

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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.

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SoK: Safer Digital-Safety Research Involving At-Risk Users

September 2023

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210 Reads

Research involving at-risk users -- that is, users who are more likely to experience a digital attack or to be disproportionately affected when harm from such an attack occurs -- can pose significant safety challenges to both users and researchers. Nevertheless, pursuing research in computer security and privacy is crucial to understanding how to meet the digital-safety needs of at-risk users and to design safer technology for all. To standardize and bolster safer research involving such users, we offer an analysis of 196 academic works to elicit 14 research risks and 36 safety practices used by a growing community of researchers. We pair this inconsistent set of reported safety practices with oral histories from 12 domain experts to contribute scaffolded and consolidated pragmatic guidance that researchers can use to plan, execute, and share safer digital-safety research involving at-risk users. We conclude by suggesting areas for future research regarding the reporting, study, and funding of at-risk user research





"There's so much responsibility on users right now:" Expert Advice for Staying Safer From Hate and Harassment

February 2023

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37 Reads

Online hate and harassment poses a threat to the digital safety of people globally. In light of this risk, there is a need to equip as many people as possible with advice to stay safer online. We interviewed 24 experts to understand what threats and advice internet users should prioritize to prevent or mitigate harm. As part of this, we asked experts to evaluate 45 pieces of existing hate-and-harassment-specific digital-safety advice to understand why they felt advice was viable or not. We find that experts frequently had competing perspectives for which threats and advice they would prioritize. We synthesize sources of disagreement, while also highlighting the primary threats and advice where experts concurred. Our results inform immediate efforts to protect users from online hate and harassment, as well as more expansive socio-technical efforts to establish enduring safety.


Fig. 1. A source from Reddit where an unknown reporter was interviewing people on the street in Russia, increasing credibility from the perspective of the participant who shared this with us.
Fig. 2. Example from @underthedesknews on TikTok providing calm, quietly-spoken news from underneath a desk, about a recent shooting in Buffalo.
Fig. 3. Two representations of information journeys. On the left, a traditional, linear journey from question to answer. On the right, a more exploratory and less definitive journey that toggles between information-seeking and information-encountering.
Practicing Information Sensibility: How Gen Z Engages with Online Information

January 2023

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580 Reads

Assessing the trustworthiness of information online is an increasingly complicated task. Literacy-based paradigms are widely used to help, yet have also been widely critiqued. We conducted a study with 35 Gen Zers from across the U.S. to understand how they assess information online. We found that they tended to encounter--rather than search for--information, and that those encounters were shaped more by social motivations than by truth-seeking queries. For them, information processing is fundamentally a social practice. Gen Zers interpreted online information together, as aspirational members of social groups. Our participants sought information sensibility: a socially-informed awareness of the value of information encountered online. We outline key challenges they faced and practices they used to make sense of information. Our findings suggest that, like Gen Z's information sensibility practices, solutions and strategies to address misinformation should also be embedded in social contexts online


“I Just Wanted to Triple Check... They were all Vaccinated”: Supporting Risk Negotiation in the Context of COVID-19

November 2022

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22 Reads

ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction

During the COVID-19 pandemic, risk negotiation became an important precursor to in-person contact. For young adults, social planning generally occurs through computer-mediated communication. Given the importance of social connectedness for mental health and academic engagement, we sought to understand how young adults plan in-person meetups over computer-mediated communication in the context of the pandemic. We present a qualitative study that explores young adults’ risk negotiation during the COVID-19 pandemic, a period of conflicting public health guidance. Inspired by cultural probe studies, we invited participants to express their preferred precautions for one week as they planned in-person meetups. We interviewed and surveyed participants about their experiences. Through qualitative analysis, we identify strategies for risk negotiation, social complexities that impede risk negotiation, and emotional consequences of risk negotiation. Our findings have implications for AI-mediated support for risk negotiation and assertive communication more generally. We explore tensions between risks and potential benefits of such systems.



Citations (80)


... Important contributions include investigations into digital security experiences [22,43,48], collective information security in movements [2,10,15,21,44], and specific digital-safety needs of journalists [11,18,40,41,58], academics [54], refugees [4,49], quasipublic internet personas [46], sex workers [37], women seeking an abortion [38,39], or survivors of intimate partner violence [5,13,20,19,35,50,53]. Providing a scaffolding to our own exploratory investigation of activists' security and privacy concerns, three papers turned out to be guideposts for our research: Warford et al. provide an overview on the existing at-risk user literature [61]; focusing on safety challenges for users and researchers, Bellini et al. examine how to conduct at-risk user research safely [6]; Kazansky highlights future-oriented strategies and "anticipatory data practices" of at-risk users [24]. ...

Reference:

"My Whereabouts, my Location, it's Directly Linked to my Physical Security": An Exploratory Qualitative Study of Location-Dependent Security and Privacy Perceptions among Activist Tech Users
SoK: Safer Digital-Safety Research Involving At-Risk Users
  • Citing Conference Paper
  • May 2024

... Some studies indicate that online-initiated relationships may be associated with lower relation-ship satisfaction, partly due to lack of physical contact [19,24]. A prominent concern is that people online are not always who they seem, which can lead to physical harm or feelings of emotional betrayal [22,25]. This is often referred to as "catfishing", whereby an individual pretends they are someone else online (sometimes using others' real photos or information) in order to deceive an individual into a relationship. ...

Understanding Digital-Safety Experiences of Youth in the U.S.
  • Citing Conference Paper
  • April 2023

... In terms of TikTok, users are predominantly adolescents (9)(10)(11)(12). These adolescent users can overconsume TikTok content because of the short lengths of its videos and are extremely susceptible to misinformation (34). Currently, there is unvalidated online information coupled with overconsumption of content, so it is important to have reliable sources of information from certified HCPs (9,34). ...

Practicing Information Sensibility: How Gen Z Engages with Online Information
  • Citing Conference Paper
  • April 2023

... Hate Speech and Hate Campaigns on Web Communities. Hate speech towards different target identity groups such as race, ethnicity, gender, religion, disability, and sexual orientation has a long-standing history on the Internet [11,12,50,61,70,72,74,82,84,85]. According to a report by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), 33% of adults experienced hate and harassment in 2023, up from 23% in 2022 [11]. ...

“There’s so much responsibility on users right now:” Expert Advice for Staying Safer From Hate and Harassment
  • Citing Conference Paper
  • April 2023

... For example, Westin used privacy preference statements in surveys to cluster people into three groups: privacy fundamentalist, privacy pragmatists, and the unconcerned (Westin 2003). This classification has often been used to study differences in (online) behaviors or how people respond to different scenarios where privacy considerations may matter (Woodruff et al. 2014). John et al. (2023) relied on aggregate privacy preferences to explain their comparative setup in a study of the role of privacy in decisions surrounding technology adoption for emergency remote teaching in schools during the COVID-19 pandemic. ...

Would a Privacy Fundamentalist Dell Their DNA for $1000... if Nothing Bad Happened as a Result? The Westin Categories, Behavioral Intentions, and Consequences

... Digital-safety research now extends beyond the conventional "average user" assumption to specifically address the risk factors and needs of so-called "high-risk" or "at-risk users". According to Warford et al. [61], at-risk users encompass individuals with factors that increase their susceptibility to digital attacks and amplify potential harms. At-risk users might be activists, dissidents, journalists, refugees, sex workers, or women seeking an abortion. ...

SoK: A Framework for Unifying At-Risk User Research
  • Citing Conference Paper
  • May 2022

... Presenting instructional videos for a longer experimental period is important to mitigate the novelty effect that arises when the treatment is new and effective only in the initial time(Lodico et al., 2010). It is more likely to occur when new technologies are introduced(Consolvo et al., 2017), such as when virtual reality (VR) is used for embodied instructional videos. ...

Mobile User Research, A Practical Guide
  • Citing Article
  • January 2017

Synthesis Lectures on Mobile and Pervasive Computing

... While such behavior may indicate high engagement, it also raises concerns about VTubers' online safety, particularly with the normalization of sexualized and aggressive interactions. Unlike previous research on harassment toward content creators [15,44], this harassment notably originates from within the VTuber's own fanbase and paying supporters. This underscores the need for new mechanisms to address this complex issue, where platforms must develop and implement stronger and flexible moderation and support systems to protect VTubers from escalating harassment and ensure a safer online environment. ...

“It’s common and a part of being a content creator”: Understanding How Creators Experience and Cope with Hate and Harassment Online
  • Citing Conference Paper
  • April 2022

... Hate Speech and Hate Campaigns on Web Communities. Hate speech towards different target identity groups such as race, ethnicity, gender, religion, disability, and sexual orientation has a long-standing history on the Internet [11,12,50,61,70,72,74,82,84,85]. According to a report by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), 33% of adults experienced hate and harassment in 2023, up from 23% in 2022 [11]. ...

SoK: Hate, Harassment, and the Changing Landscape of Online Abuse
  • Citing Conference Paper
  • May 2021

... The affective domain primarily included anxiety and depression, with some studies also emphasizing the role of dysphoric emotional states in the characterization of APD, namely irritability, frustration, anger, shame, upset, guilt, and hostility (Kanter Agliata & Renk, 2009;Holding et al., 2020;Julien et al., 2009;Morris et al., 2021;Padrón et al., 2021;Renshaw & Bolognino, 2016). Across studies, a variety of anxiety symptoms were detected: nervousness and restlessness, excessive academic preoccupation and worry, difficulty relaxing, feeling tense and under strain. ...

College from home during COVID-19: A mixed-methods study of heterogeneous experiences