View article

Intimate partner abusers use technology to track, monitor, harass, and otherwise harm their victims, and prior work reports that victims have few resources for obtaining help with such attacks. This paper presents a qualitative analysis of data from a field study of an approach to helping survivors of intimate partner violence (IPV) with technology abuse. In this approach, called clinical computer security, a trained technologist performs a face-to-face consultation with an IPV survivor to help them understand and navigate technology issues. Findings from consultations with 31 survivors, as well as IPV professionals working on their behalf, uncovered a range of digital security and privacy vulnerabilities exacerbated by the nuanced social context of such abuse.

In this paper we explore survivor experiences with, and reactions to, the consultations, discussing (1) the ways in which survivors present their tech concerns, (2 …