Jamar Sullivan Jr., Will Brackenbury, Andrew McNutt, Kevin Bryson, Kwam Byll, Yuxin Chen, Michael Littman, Chenhao Tan, Blase Ur. Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies. 2022.

In 2020, there were widespread Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests in the U.S. Because many attendees were novice protesters, organizations distributed guides for staying safe at a protest, often including security and privacy advice. To understand what advice novice protesters are given, we collected 41 safety guides distributed during BLM protests in spring 2020. We identified 13 classes of digital security and privacy advice in these guides. To understand whether this advice influences protesters, we surveyed 167 BLM protesters. Respondents reported an array of security and privacy concerns, and their concerns were magnified when considering fellow protesters. While most respondents reported being aware of, and following, certain advice (e.g., choosing a strong phone passcode), many were unaware of key advice like using end-to-end encrypted messengers and disabling biometric phone unlocking. Our results can guide future advice and technologies to help novice protesters protect their security and privacy.