Nick Ceccio, Naman Gupta, Majed Almansoori, Rahul Chatterjee (University of Wisconsin-Madison)
Intimate partner violence (IPV) is a prevalent societal issue that affects many people globally. Unfortunately, abusers rely on technology to spy on their partners. Prior works show that victims and advocates fail to combat and prevent technology-enabled stalking due to their limited technical background. However, not much is known about this issue; why do victims and advocates struggle to combat technology-enabled stalking despite the ease of finding resources online? To answer this question, we aim to conduct a mixed-method study to explore smartphone usage patterns and internet search behavior while detecting and preventing technology-enabled abuse. In this future work, we plan to conduct a mixed-method between-group study to investigate the smartphone usage patterns and internet search behavior of participants helping their friend combat technology-enabled spying. We expect the tech-savvy participants to be more effective and time-efficient in finding and disabling stalking methods than non-tech-savvy participants.