Hi, everyone.
I'm Emily Tseng, from Cornell University.
And before I get started just a quick warning.
This talk will discuss intimate partner violence, domestic violence, stalking and harassment.
I'll be sharing my team's work assisting victims and survivors of IPV with their digital security
and privacy.
So if this will be triggering for you, I'll give you a moment now to mute me or leave
the room.
Okay.
So intimate partner violence, or IPV, is an umbrella term for many forms of violence,
including physical and emotional abuse, stalking, and harassment, that's enacted against someone
by a current or former intimate partner, so a spouse or significant other.
We know that IPV is widespread, causing serious and long lasting traumas.
And we also know that in our modern moment, many of these traumas are enacted through
digital technologies.
Smartphones and social networks leak location information that abusers use to stalk their
victims.
Spyware tools that monitor calls, texts, browsing histories and keystrokes are easily found
on App Stores, and abusers have numerous resources online to learn how to use a former partner's
digital footprint against them.
Now, people like IPV survivors, who face targeted and persistent digital attacks, they're not
readily served by our existing models of computer security and privacy.
They need direct security assistance that is long term, trustworthy, accessible and
sensitive to their experiences of harm.
But tech companies tend to focus their efforts on engineering and supporting scalable solutions
for wide use.
And this challenge affects not only IPV survivors, but also people like political dissidents,
sex workers, journalists, and targets of online harassment.
I'll argue today that to address these challenges, we have to rethink our approaches to digital
security and privacy.
What would it look like to center not only the security of our products, but also the
feeling of safety in the people who are meant to use them.
Such a holistic and socially oriented approach might look like the feminist ethic of care,
which emphasizes creating caring relations through our technical and social infrastructures.
A caring approach to security has been considered by scholars in HCI and CSCW, who have argued
that security and privacy ought to be construed less as misalignment between developers, attackers
and end users, and more as collective and relational information practice, what I will
call care infrastructure.
We took these ideas around security as care, and we sought a practical enactment of them
through the Clinic to End Tech Abuse, or CETA.
We're a volunteer group founded in 2018, providing direct tech assistance to survivors of IPV
referred to us from our community partner, the New York City Mayor's Office to End Domestic
and Gender Based Violence.
You can think of us as security and privacy tech support with specialized training in
the unique threat model of IPV and the principles of trauma informed care.
And we call this approach clinical computer security.
Now, our prior efforts enabled us to start providing this service in manageable ways.
But they also had several important limitations.
Like most forms of tech support, they were single session, double blind, and held via
synchronous phone calls.
And this meant we were naturally limited in the types of clients that we could see.
Consider, for example, a client who can't find a safe and quiet place for a phone conversation,
or a client who can't take an hour out of their workday, or a client whose case simply
needs longer term follow up.
To meet these needs, we created a new care model, adopting principles from the feminist
ethic of care.
This meant enabling multiple sessions with one lead consultant, a longer term care relation.
And as summarized on this slide, we built lots of specific social arrangements and technical
solutions to enable this, including anonymized communication lines, both synchronous and
asynchronous, and a secure case record system.
In our new model, clients are only ever contacted by one assigned consultant, who can then pull
in other specialized consultants as needed.
Think less Geek Squad, and more primary care doctor.
We deployed this model in CETA in December of 2020.
And this paper is our study of how it went.
We looked at notes and session transcripts from 62 consenting clients, and we also interviewed
seven consultants who delivered these sessions, as well as 18 IPV professionals who referred
their clients to CETA, so caseworkers and staffers with our partnering city agency.
This was a reflexive and reflective form of research.
Myself and my coauthors, we're all volunteers with CETA, and we set out here to conduct
autoethnographic work documenting and reflecting on our practice.
This paper contains lots of detail also on how we enforce reflexivity in our analysis.
So, what do we find?
First, we have early indications that the new care model is enabling greater access.
Clients with shifting and higher risk situations are more able to seek help.
And we also report positive feedback from referring IPV professionals, who are eager
to see the service grow to help more and more people.
However, delivering this new care model required balancing four key tensions.
In brief, we saw first the problem of safely connecting to people under suspicion of targeted
surveillance.
We discussed this in prior work, but it came up in interesting new ways here.
For example, how do you as a volunteer care provider authenticate yourself to a client
while not giving away your identity in case an abuser is listening?
Second, we found that the new model enabled adaptations to clients' disparate and ever
changing needs.
Our new systems enabled matching of clients to consultants with specific expertise, as
well as the ability to build rapport over time.
And this all seems to have helped clients, but did take a lot of extra work from us as
volunteer consultants.
This is also our third major tension, the need to establish and maintain boundaries
on client's own time and availability.
We're clear from the beginning always that we're not a crisis service.
But when you enable asynchronous and multimodal communication, it does have the inadvertent
effect of creating the illusion that you are always on.
And lastly, we found tension in how consultants dealt with the uncertainties of security as
care, as one put it, quote, we often don't have any tangible ground truth unquote.
It's often hard to know precisely what attack vector is being exploited, or what else might
be responsible for the abuse a client is experiencing.
In the absence of ground truth, consultants tried to reassure clients while delivering
technical knowledge.
But it's often hard to know if you're truly connecting with someone, especially over an
asynchronous channel like text or email.
Confronting each of these tensions is fruitful ground for future work refining the practice
of clinical computer security.
Looking ahead, we're very excited by the practical impact of our work.
As of February, we've helped about 150 clients using this new care model.
Now, when I started this talk, I started with the idea that security and privacy ought to
be considered care, and clinics like ours care infrastructures.
And for us, the designers and builders of the sociotechnical systems that underlie care
processes, this framing, I think, opens rich new avenues of inquiry.
Consider, for example, the need for better integration of what are currently considered
the emotional and technical labors involved in clinical computer security.
Consider also the need for new approaches to measuring security and privacy risks for
people who face targeted and persistent attacks, and evaluating the care provided for them.
We see a role for clinics like CETA in forming a real world evidence base for this new approach
to security, drawing it closer to other institutionalized care disciplines like medicine, social work
and public health.
And just as in those disciplines, we must foreground in this work the human elements
of care, the improvisational and unquantifiable bits that we instinctively recognize as necessary.
building tools that advance care while retaining those qualities requires new commitments and
methodologies, ones that I'm excited to explore.
For more, I'd encourage you to check out the paper at bit.ly/care-security-ipv.
And to discuss this work, please don't hesitate to reach out to me.
Thanks again to my team and to all the volunteers at CETA, and to you for listening, and I'll
look forward to your questions.