Creating information technologies intended for broad use that allow everyone to participate safely online—which we refer to as inclusive digital safety —requires understanding and addressing the digital-safety needs of a diverse range of users who face elevated risk of technology-facilitated attacks or disproportionate harm from such attacks—i.e., at-risk users . This article draws from more than 9 years of our work at Google to understand and support the digital safety of at-risk users—including survivors of intimate partner abuse, people involved with political campaigns, content creators, youth, and more—in technology intended for broad use. Among our learnings is that designing for inclusive digital safety across widely varied user needs and dynamic contexts is a wicked problem with no “correct” solution. Given this, we describe frameworks and design principles we have developed to help make at-risk research findings practically applicable to technologies intended for broad use and lessons we have learned about communicating them to practitioners.

Attack strategies used by online harassers have evolved over time to inflict increasing harm to their targets. In addition to scaling harassment through incitement and coordination, online communities that commonly engage in harassment are likely a source of "innovation" for harassment attack strategies. We use the incitements or calls to harassment posted by members of these communities as a lens through which to holistically measure and understand this ecosystem. We create a filtering pipeline to discover 14,679 incitements to harassment within four large-scale data sets of messages and posts that span multiple platforms.

Addressing digital security and privacy issues can be particularly difficult for users who face challenging circumstances. We performed semi-structured interviews with residents and staff at 4 transitional homeless shelters in the U.S. San Francisco Bay Area (n=15 residents, 3 staff) to explore their digital security and privacy challenges. Based on these interviews, we outline four tough times themes --- challenges experienced by our financially insecure participants that impacted their digital security and privacy --- which included: (1) limited financial resources, (2) limited access to reliable devices and Internet, (3) untrusted relationships, and (4) ongoing stress. We provide examples of how each theme impacts digital security and privacy practices and needs. We then use these themes to provide a framework outlining opportunities for technology creators to better support users facing security and privacy challenges related to financial insecurity.

We present a qualitative study of the digital privacy and security motivations, practices, and challenges of survivors of intimate partner abuse (IPA). This paper provides a framework for organizing survivors' technology practices and challenges into three phases: physical control, escape, and life apart. This three-phase framework combines technology practices with three phases of abuse to provide an empirically sound method for technology creators to consider how survivors of IPA can leverage new and existing technologies. Overall, our results suggest that the usability of and control over privacy and security functions should be or continue to be high priorities for technology creators seeking ways to better support survivors of IPA.

Many technologies assume a single user will use an account or device. But account and device sharing situations (when 2+ people use a single device or account) may arise during everyday life. We present results from a multiple-methods study of device and account sharing practices among household members and their relations. Among our findings are that device and account sharing was common, and mobile phones were often shared despite being considered "personal" devices. Based on our study results, we organize sharing practices into a taxonomy of six sharing types--distinct patterns of what, why, and how people shared. We also present two themes that cut across sharing types: that (1) trust in sharees and (2) convenience highly influenced sharing practices. Based on these findings, we discuss implications for study and technology design.