This research has a foundational, multi-disciplinary research agenda that examines the role of technology in intimate partner violence and investigates the development of new tools, techniques, and theories to combat technology-enabled abuse. The work is important because digital technologies play an increasingly prominent role in domestic violence, stalking, and surveillance by abusive partners and others known to the victim. The research builds on prior work detailing the ways in which abusers exploit technology to monitor, harass, track, and control victims. This kind of abuse challenges common approaches to computer security: although the attacks that abusers employ are often technically unsophisticated, the social and relational contexts in which attacks occur make them difficult to prevent.
The proposed work weaves together research activities including building measurement platforms for making sense of abuser communities that are found online, designing tools for detecting spyware or apps usable as spyware on victim devices, developing a theory of adversary-aware human computer interaction that will guide user interface design in the face of adversaries that have a victim's login credentials, analyzing the efficacy of general consumer privacy legislation for abuse contexts, and seeking out pragmatic law and policy recommendations. The research makes the safety of (potential) victims paramount, which is facilitated by working closely with stakeholder organizations.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
