Exploring technology safety in the context of intimate partner violence, sexual assault, and violence against women.
Managed by the Safety Net Project at the National Network to End Domestic Violence (NNEDV), this blog explores the intersection between technology, intimate partner violence, sexual assault, and violence against women.
Safety Net focuses on the intersection of technology and abuse, and we work to address how that abuse impacts the safety, privacy, accessibility, and civil rights of survivors. Our team provides expert training and technical assistance, creates and disseminates resources, and influences conversations on technology abuse and safety globally. Safety Net is a project of the National Network to End Domestic Violence.
It was another busy year where we worked to expand partnerships and explore new strategies to support victim service providers in addressing the impact of current and emerging technologies on victims’ safety, privacy, accessibility, and civil rights.
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Screenshot Safety Net year in review image
This year we all experienced unprecedented changes in how we do our work due to COVID-19. While quarantining at home or navigating essential work safely, we all had to quickly shift to adapt to the needs of survivors, learning new technologies, and understanding the risks and challenges with the pandemic. Simultaneously, we witnessed a social reckoning with the call to action to center Black and Brown lives in this country and the rights of victims and survivors.
With all that was going on, in the chaos of switching to full remote work, we worked diligently to respond to the needs of the field with timely information ranging from webinars, handouts, technical assistance, and adjusting our Tech Summit to a virtual space. As 2020 ends, with so much to mourn, we also celebrate the successes of this year, while still focusing on how to improve our training, technical assistance, and services. We could not have done this work without our generous sponsors and funders and the dedication from the field to continue to put emphasis on survivor-centered practices.
We share with you some of the highlights from 2020 and hope that as we end this year, we remember our core values and hold a refreshed sense of advocacy. We are also in awe of the sheer determination we witnessed from programs across the country to meet the needs of survivors, regardless of what challenges the year brought. We hope that all of you take a moment to look at your accomplishments too because despite how the year has been, they are there and they are important.
1. We Trained, We Saw, We Conquered- This year we provided 75 trainings for all types of service providers. At the beginning of the year, our COVID-19 rapid response focused on Working Remotely During a Public Health Crisis, FAQ’s on Confidentiality & COVID-19, and helping programs to assess the benefits and risks of technology. This was especially important as we saw an increase in survivors using tech to communicate with services and their loved ones. We developed content on contact tracing, working with older adult survivors and survivors with disabilities who are using technology, and voter registration. In total, we have trained over 11,902 advocates, law enforcement, legal professionals, and other service providers this year. Even though most of our training was conducted from our homes, we were still able to provide training for advocates in many countries including Tribal communities, almost all 56 states and territories, and even virtually trained abroad in places like Taiwan, Italy, Afghanistan, and more.
All of the Countries, States and Territories The Safety Net Team Trained this year
2. Answering Difficult Questions: We always get a lot of requests for technical assistance (TA), but this year we received more TA than ever. We provided TA on complex technology-facilitated abuse, how to set up remote services, confidentiality and working remotely, helping survivors vote safely, technologists looking to create products, apps, software; and the list goes on. We provided close to 500 hours of technical assistance this year. Understanding the ins and outs of technology, confidentiality, and service provision can be complex and we are always willing to help programs as they work with survivors to understand these nuances.
3. Tech Summit Goes Virtual: It’s one thing to provide guidance on how to conduct a virtual event, it’s another to put it into practice. We hosted our annual Tech Summit, taking a 3-day in-person conference and made it a 5-day virtual event. We had close to 750 people register to attend and to receive recordings of the training. We worked to ensure that even though we were virtual, the sessions were engaging and informative. Though we ran into a few technical difficulties, we learned from them, and are excited to come back next year, whether virtual or in-person. Our Tips for Hosting a Virtual Event Guide has more information to help you as you plan a virtual event.
As we move into 2021, we continue to keep the needs of the field and survivors at the heart of what we do. We are looking to ensure that our content is always timely and relevant, factoring in the unique needs many communities have, and the ways that access to technology is still a barrier for many survivors.
We know that confidentiality, the digital divide, providing remote and digital services, and transformative justice in technology are all topics we want to explore more and incorporate into our training, materials, webinars, and how we do this work.
We are grateful every day for the amazing ways we get to support programs, technologists, service providers, and survivors. We know that this year has been complicated, exhausting, and has really shifted our collective thinking in how survivors reach out to services, how programs communicate, and all of the in-between.
We are hopeful as we go into the new year, knowing that we will bring our same core values to center the voices of survivors, empowering survivors in their technology use, and supporting programs as we all work to end violence for all.
Check out our infographic to learn more about how we did our work this year! Read more about NNEDV’s reflections on 2020.
Exciting news… In the past couple of months, there has been some significant movement in the work against stalkerware. The term stalkerware, AKA spyware, refers to apps, software, or devices that allow someone to monitor or record the activity of another person’s phone or computer without their consent or knowledge. For many years, the term spyware has been used to describe the type of monitoring and surveillance these types of apps and software have prided themselves on. However, as advocates and technologists have come to better understand just how these programs and apps work, we have identified that the characteristics of these types of apps and programs are stalking behaviors. In recent years, there has been a shift in the work to identify and call these types of problematic programs and apps what they really are, which is stalkerware. This technology is incredibly sneaky and is used by abusers and stalkers as a tool to monitor, surveil, intimidate, harass, and control someone. While stalkerware still remains a significant issue for survivors of abuse, tedious but necessary work has been happening to curb both the existence of these products and their misuse.
Last week the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced their first case against a developer of stalking apps. Their investigation of and settlement with Retina-X Studios, LLC has ended with the company’s three stalking apps - MobileSpy, PhoneSheriff, and TeenShield – taken off the market and the company prohibited from selling apps that monitor devices unless they take steps to ensure they will only be used for legitimate purposes. These include not requiring jailbreaking or rooting of the device to function, acquiring written verification from the purchaser that the app will only be used for legal purposes, ensuring a visible icon remains on the device that can provide the user with information, and deleting all personal information previously collected by the apps. Prior to the settlement, all three of Retina-X’s apps required the purchaser to circumvent the phone’s security features by either jailbreaking or rooting the phone and then allowed the person to monitor the phone remotely without any notice to the owner of the device.
When the apps were taken off the market, they had more than 15,000 subscriptions. Anyone doing this work knows that a large number of those subscriptions were likely used for abusive purposes and likely brought much harm in the time they were used. We are grateful to the FTC for their leadership on this and for bringing us in during the process prior to the announcement. We worked closely with the FTC to create graphics to accompany their announcement and provided feedback on the notification language they were crafting.
Clues that stalkerware may be on device
Today, the announcement was made about the creation of the Coalition Against Stalkerware and the new resource, StopStalkerware.org. We are a member of this Coalition, which is made up of technology companies and advocacy organizations. Leading up to this, we have been working with several anti-spyware companies to learn more about stalkerware, the options to prevent and detect it, and ensure that the experiences of survivors are understood. The Coalition will work together to create industry-wide standards for defining and detecting stalkerware, strategies to increase education and awareness about the issue for survivors, and potential solutions to eliminate spyware completely. Many of the companies involved have been conducting research and increasing education for prevention for many years, and we are enthusiastic to be able to share and collaborate on this effort.
We also recently participated in Virus Bulletin’s Annual Conference alongside Kaspersky. This event is focused on international threat intelligence and it was a meaningful opportunity to bring the voices of advocates and survivors into that space. We learned a great deal about this work and provided training around the misuse of stalkerware apps and their implications for survivors of abuse.
Because of the swift momentum of these growing partnerships and the urge to ensure helpful information is available to survivors, we have worked diligently to update our own materials around spyware/stalkerware within the Survivor Technology and Privacy Toolkit.
We are excited to be a part of the changing landscape in both government and technology spaces in terms of holding spyware/stalkerware companies and abusers accountable. This work will require many partners and approaches to ensure that the products being created do not intentionally harm survivors and will be a critical piece to the broader goal of addressing abuse.
Managed by the Safety Net Project at the National Network to End Domestic Violence (NNEDV), this blog explores the intersection of technology and privacy and intimate partner violence, sexual assault and violence against women.
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