Research involving at-risk users—that is, users who are more likely to experience a digital attack or to be disproportionately affected when harm from such an attack occurs—can pose significant safety challenges to both users and researchers. Nevertheless, pursuing research in computer security & privacy (S&P) is crucial to understanding how to meet the digital-safety needs of at-risk users and to design safer technology for all. To standardize and bolster safer research involving such users, we offer an analysis of 196 academic works to elicit 14 research risks and 36 safety practices used by a growing community of researchers. We pair this inconsistent set of reported safety practices with oral histories from 12 domain experts to contribute scaffolded and consolidated pragmatic guidance that researchers can use to plan, execute, and share safer digital-safety research involving at-risk users. We conclude by suggesting areas for future research regarding the reporting, study, and funding of at-risk user research.

Political activism is a worldwide force in geopolitical change and has, historically, helped lead to greater justice, equality, and stopping human rights abuses. A modern revolution—an extreme form of political activism—pits activists, who rely on technology for critical operational tasks, against a resource-rich government that controls the very telecommunications network they must use to operationalize, putting the technology they use under extreme stress. Our work presents insights about activists’ technological defense strategies from interviews with 13 political activists who were active during the 2018-2019 Sudanese revolution. We find that politics and society are driving factors of security and privacy behavior and app adoption. Moreover, a social media blockade can trigger a series of anti-censorship approaches at scale, while a complete internet blackout can cripple activists’ use of technology. Even though the activists’ technological defenses against the threats of surveillance, arrest and physical device seizure were low tech, they were largely sufficient against their adversary. Through these results, we surface key design principles, but we observe that the generalization of design recommendations often runs into fundamental tensions between the security and usability needs of different user groups. Thus, we provide a set of structured questions in an attempt to turn these tensions into opportunities for technology designers and policy makers.