This paper investigates how deeply entrenched offline gender norms and patriarchal power structures constrain and shape participation within Tech Aids, a large Facebook community in Pakistan focused on peer-to-peer technical help and e-commerce transactions. Through a qualitative study involving 14 months of participant observation and 20 semi-structured interviews (11 male, 9 female), we document significant gendered disparities: women exhibit lower public engagement, driven primarily by heightened privacy concerns, fear of harassment, and perceived male gatekeeping. Our analysis reveals that traditional socio-cultural restrictions on women’s mobility and constrained interactions with unfamiliar men in physical tech marketplaces are directly mirrored in the online Tech Aids environment. To manage these risks, women actively engage in practices of digital purdah, using workarounds like proxy-posting through male relatives to maintain both technical access and cultural modesty. By linking these offline barriers to online participation strategies, this study provides a vulnerability-centric framework and actionable design insights for creating more equitable online tech communities that explicitly address complex, deeply rooted socio-cultural constraints in non-WEIRD contexts.

This study examines the pedagogical approaches and experiences of community-engaged educators—individuals who teach privacy, online safety, or security to specific communities through community organizations, companies, or local institutions, such as libraries. We draw on interviews with 21 such educators across the United States and find that, unlike some privacy and security advice that may emphasize knowledge retention of common skills and strategies, these educators prioritized teaching for independent decision-making. Our participants conceptualized privacy literacy as a process for taking informed action, and, from their insights, we identified five core competencies of privacy literacy: (1) data fluency, (2) account security, (3) fraud detection, (4) information vetting, and (5) surveillance capitalism. Notably, these competencies integrate privacy, security, and online safety concepts into privacy literacy—reflecting an increasingly integrated threat landscape. Embedded within the communities they serve, these educators shared their deep understanding of their students’ needs, which varied dramatically, and shared ways in which they tailored their programming accordingly. However, educators also shared significant teaching constraints, including limited time, resources, and organizational support. We discuss the implications of our findings for privacy literacy and for supporting community-engaged privacy literacy efforts.

We explore privacy perceptions, beliefs and practices of low-literate, low-income users in Pakistan, a patriarchal and religious context with a literacy rate of approx. 68% and where 59% of mobile users have less than 6 years of formal education. Through a qualitative study with 40 participants (17 male and 23 female) we examine the cultural, religious, and familial structures that impact users perceptions, management, and control of their personal privacy. We reveal significant gendered differences in privacy understandings, privacy preserving practices and the access to privacy related knowledge. Our work also highlights the seminal impact religious beliefs have on men and women’s understandings and management of privacy and the prolific use of after-market modified apps to support users specific privacy needs. The privacy concerns raised by our participants provide HCI researchers with valuable insights into designing privacy affordances for vulnerable and diverse populations beyond Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic contexts.