Safer (cyber)spaces: reconfiguring digital security towards solidarity

Thesis

As technology increasingly mediates our relationships, it also enables existing patterns of coercion, abuse, and control. This thesis investigates digital safety and security in the context of intimate violence and coercive control. I first develop a feminist critique of cybersecurity: namely, that due to the discipline’s engineering focus on defending networks and information, cybersecurity neglects the human element, and particularly differences in power and relationships between humans that produce (in)security. Feminist and critical theories, which centre gender and power in interpersonal relationships, provide a useful corrective to this highly masculinised and avowedly apolitical field. Taking this critique as a starting point, I present a set of studies that answer the overarching research question: “how can we reconfigure cybersecurity to account for tech-facilitated coercive control?” I focus on responses to the phenomenon of technology-enabled coercive control, or ‘tech abuse’ as a site for examining alternative security practices.

I then present three studies that reconfigure cybersecurity through running participatory workshops with excluded and marginalised groups, interviewing advocates who support survivors of technology abuse and addressing intimate violence in cybersecurity design. The model of cybersecurity that emerges from these studies is relational, made up of communal ‘networks of care’ rather than devices and individuals. This carries weight for questions of epistemology and academic knowledge production; my work centres the knowledge of unconventional and unacknowledged experts, such as survivors of abuse and community practitioners who support them. These people are cybersecurity experts due to their on-the-ground understanding of how technology is co-opted for abuse. Security practitioners should recognise the expertise inherent in these care networks to build on and strengthen them with a mindset of solidarity rather than turning these social problems into opportunities to pitch new technical products. Cybersecurity which starts with people (not machines), especially marginalised people, points our attention to dismantling the broader structures that create insecurity rather than patching technical vulnerabilities. In doing so, this reconfigured security becomes a call for solidarity.

Authors: Slupska, J

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-dq9xpxk6z
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: domestic violence; feminism; technology abuse; coercive control; cybersecurity; participatory action research; migrant domestic workers; surveillance; solidarity
• Subjects: Cyberstalking; Privacy; Security systems; Feminism